• @[email protected]
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    21 year ago

    I was incorrect about the goal being minimal resources. I should have written that that goal was to have controlled resource usage. The salt does not increase the expense of the the hash function. Key stretching techniques like adding rounds increase the expense to reach the final hash output but does not increase the expense of the hash function. High password length allowances of several thousand characters should not lead to a denial of service attack but they don’t materially increase security after a certain length either.

    • andrew
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      21 year ago

      I’m arguing semantics here but bcrypt is the hashing function. Per the Wikipedia article on bcrypt:

      bcrypt is a password-hashing function designed by Niels Provos and David Mazières, based on the Blowfish cipher and presented at USENIX in 1999.

      Blowfish being a symmetric encryption cipher, not a hashing function.

      Agreed on the rest, though. The hashing cost of a long password would not lead to DOS any more than the bandwidth of accepting that password etc. It’s not the bottleneck. But also no extra security beyond a point, so might as well not bother when passwords are too long.

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        Semantics aside it sounds like we are in agreement. Have another upvote. :)

        Why does upvoting feel better without a karma system? shrug