2
votes
2answers
336 views

Salted hashes vs HMAC?

Most of discussions involving access credentials include references to "hashing salted passwords". Is this another way to referring to the HMAC algorithm or a totally different operation? Different or ...
1
vote
3answers
163 views

Is it a good idea to have a “master” password?

Though I do have a good memory of passwords, it is quite impossible to have one password per application. Yet, it should be... My current way to deal with passwords is to have five passwords and to ...
3
votes
3answers
151 views

Methods for remembering passwords around the web

What's the least painful way to manage passwords for user accounts that you have on various sites? I see only 3 options: Password manager. Passwords can be different and strong, but the downside is ...
196
votes
9answers
20k views

Is my developer's home-brew password security right or wrong, and why?

Our developer, let's call him 'Dave', insists on using a home-brew script for hashing passwords. See Dave's proposal below. We have already researched and adopted an industry standard protocol using ...
4
votes
1answer
192 views

How will security need to be changed if we can crack password hashes in quasi-polynomial time?

If we suppose that we have access to some form of generalized password hacking/cracking that can somehow find an $n$-bit password in time $O(n^{\log n})$, is there need for alarm? This question ...
5
votes
3answers
255 views

How can we factor Moore's law into password cracking estimates?

How would we go about factoring Moore's law into exceedingly long password cracking estimates? Let's say we've got a 12 character password containing mixed-case alpha characters and numbers, i.e. ...