How do I implement salt into my login for passwords?

Solution 1:

The point of a salt is to prevent attackers from amortizing the cost of a brute force attack across sites (or better yet, when using a different salt for each user: all users of a site) through precomputed rainbow tables.

With plain hashing, an attacker can compute such a table once (a very long, costly operation) and then use it to quickly find passwords for any site. When a site uses one fixed salt, the attacker has to compute a new table specifically for that site. When a site uses a different salt for each user, the attacker can stop bothering with rainbow tables - he'll have to brute-force each single password separately.

Storing the salts separately is not necessary to gain this advantage. In theory it would be even more secure because it would neutralize the weakness of dictionary or short passwords. In practice, it's not worth bothering with because at the end of the day, you need access to the salts somewhere to check passwords. Also, trying to separate them would lead to more complex systems - and the more complex a system is, the more opportunities for security holes there are.

Edit: My concrete recommendations:

• Generate long pseudorandom salt for each user and store in in the DB
• Use a bcrypt-based hash
• ideally, don't implement it yourself, use an existing library instead

Solution 2:

An hash function always return the same value for the same input string. Let's say my user (Alice) has the password secret. Hashing secret using md5() leads to the following hash

5ebe2294ecd0e0f08eab7690d2a6ee69

Using a dictionary (a list of common words and password) or one of the various sites that offer you that service, the attacker (Mallory) can easily find out the password is secret when he sees in his dictionary that 5ebe2294ecd0e0f08eab7690d2a6ee69 = secret.

The process of salting before hashing makes it harder to use a dictionary attack without knowing your salt. Consider the following:

<?php
$salt = '@!#%$@#$@SADLkwod,sdaDwqksjaoidjwq@#@!';
$hash = md5($salt . 'secret');

The resulting hash is now b58ad809eece17322de5024d79299f8a but Alice's password is still secret. Now if Mallory gets her hands on the salted hash, chances are she will not find the answer in her dictionary. If she does, the dictionary will give her the wrong answer.

Never store a static salt in your database. Preferably store it with your application's configuration (which by the way should not be available from the web).

If you are going to use a dynamic salt, you are going to need to use the database. Use a non-null column of existing valid data to build your salt on (blowfish-encrypted string of username based on a secret encryption key is usually cryptographically secure). Do not use a separate column for the salt. If you cannot use an existing column, incorporate your salt in the same column than your hash. For example, use the first 32 characters for your 128-bits salt and then the last 40 for your 160-bits hash. The following function will generate such an hash:

function seeded_sha1($string, $seed_bits) {
    if(($seed_bits % 8) != 0) {
        throw new Exception('bits must be divisible by 8');
    }

    $salt = '';
    for($i = 0; $i < $seed_bits; $i+=8) {
        $salt .= pack('c', mt_rand());
    }

    $hexsalt = unpack('h*hex', $salt);

    return $hexsalt['hex'] . sha1($salt . $string);
}

function compare_seeded_sha1($plain, $hash) {
    $sha1 = substr($hash, -40);
    $salt = pack('h*', substr($hash, 0, -40));

    $plain_hash = sha1($salt . $plain);
    return ($plain_hash == $sha1);
}

If an attacker gets in your database using SQL injection, at least the hashes he/she retrieves won't be useful since he/she won't have access to your application configuration. If your server gets rooted, it's pretty much game-over no matter what you do.

Note: There are other types of attack possible on md5() which is why you use more secure hashing algorithm, sha1() for example. Or, even better, use the Portable PHP password hashing framework, which has been designed with security in mind and is backwards compatible with pretty much any PHP version.

require('PasswordHash.php');

$pwdHasher = new PasswordHash(8, FALSE);

// $hash is what you would store in your database
$hash = $pwdHasher->HashPassword( $password );

// $hash would be the $hashed stored in your database for this user
$checked = $pwdHasher->CheckPassword($password, $hash);
if ($checked) {
    echo 'password correct';
} else {
    echo 'wrong credentials';
}

Solution 3:

Forget about using salts (partly for the reason you mention), use bcrypt instead:

For a good explanation see: http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/