How often haven’t you read about entire user databases being retrieved from vulnerable websites? And how often do people use the same password multiple places? Let me answer both those questions: too often.

Let us assume that Ada is running a website for her guild. She has decided to code the thing from scratch, and are about to implement the user management system. She decided she’d only need to store username, password, and user type in the accounts table.

She knows that storing passwords in plain text is unacceptable, and think they need to be hashed. Therefore she decides to store the MD5 hashes of the passwords. When someone try to log in, the code checks if the MD5 hash of the specified password is equal to that stored in the database. She’s thinking that if someone somehow attained a copy of the users table, they wouldn’t get to find the real passwords in a sensible amount of time because the passwords are hashed and they’d have to mount a brute force attack to obtain it.

She’s wrong. A direct hashing of a password is vulnerable to rainbow table attacks. While a few conditions apply, this method makes the process of retrieving the password from the user database instant. Even though she didn’t store the passwords in plain text, they’d still be easily exposed. Knowing this, she decide to salt the passwords. This means the password will be modified in some way before being turned into a hash; usually by adding some string to the end of the input password. She knows of two ways to do this.

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