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Systems that use passwords for authentication must have some way to check any password entered to gain access. If the valid passwords are simply stored in a system file or database, an attacker who gains sufficient access to the system will obtain all user passwords, giving the attacker access to all accounts on the attacked system and possibly other systems where users employ the same or ...
Brute-force attacks work by calculating every possible combination that could make up a password and testing it to see if it is the correct password. As the password's length increases, the amount of time, on average, to find the correct password increases exponentially. [6]
A random password generator is a software program or hardware device that takes input from a random or pseudo-random number generator and automatically generates a password. Random passwords can be generated manually, using simple sources of randomness such as dice or coins , or they can be generated using a computer.
[2] This level of unpredictability assumes that potential attackers know three things: that Diceware has been used to generate the passphrase, the particular word list used, and exactly how many words make up the passphrase. If the attacker has less information, the entropy can be greater than 12.9 bits/word. [3]
PBKDF2 applies a pseudorandom function, such as hash-based message authentication code (HMAC), to the input password or passphrase along with a salt value and repeats the process many times to produce a derived key, which can then be used as a cryptographic key in subsequent operations.
The salt value is not secret and may be generated at random and stored with the password hash. A large salt value prevents precomputation attacks, including rainbow tables, by ensuring that each user's password is hashed uniquely. This means that two users with the same password will have different password hashes (assuming different salts are ...
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To solve this problem, they use SCRAM, where Bob can store his password in a salted format, using PBKDF2. During login, Bob sends Alice his salt and the iteration count of the PBKDF2 algorithm, and then Alice uses these to calculate the hashed password that Bob has in his database. All further calculations in SCRAM base on this value which both ...