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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 ...
7
votes
1answer
306 views

Identifying an unknown hash

During some of my research work I encountered an unknown hashed string. What I am curious about is the algorithm used to generate it. A factor that makes it interesting - the string contains an ...
7
votes
5answers
387 views

How to prevent pay per show/click abuse?

We have a webapp. 3rd party websites put our banners on their pages (banner is a snippet of HTML). They are paid for it using "Pay per click" or "Pay per show" methods. So 3rd party website's owners ...
5
votes
3answers
257 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. ...
5
votes
2answers
206 views

Does chaos theory have any practical application in computer security?

Having learned about chaos theory at university some years ago, I've been curious ever since to know whether it has found any practical use in computing. Let me explain where I imagine it could be ...
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 ...
3
votes
2answers
243 views

How realistic and possible is this sort of attack

I scanned a host with Nessus, in order to do a vulnerability Assessment, and one of the findings looked really odd to me. Nessus rated this finding's risk as Medium. The finding was, that a service ...
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 ...
2
votes
2answers
342 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 ...
2
votes
5answers
362 views

Is there an asymmetric encryption algorithm that maintains the length of the plaintext?

I want to protect some registers by encrypting them without providing additional memory space. Is there a encryption algorithm that will maintain the length of the data to be encrypted? (i.e. ...
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 ...
0
votes
1answer
117 views

Determine hashing algorthim only with known input and output

Given the input: test A system generates the following output hash: 0x001F41B6A0534D3B851D69EFE6237F550100000010D5F4FC65E64BCFDBF2590212E4411C44942C6C734C00ACFE13B958DCAB3614 I do not know ...
-7
votes
1answer
62 views

Asymmetric encryption algorithms [closed]

What are the best asymmetric encryption algorithms out there? I am trying to use RSA in my project howoever I have read that it is not quite secure as other asymmetric encryption algorithms.