Which shouldn’t even matter because passwords are salted and hashed before storing them, so you’re not actually saving anything. At least they better be. If you’re not hashing passwords you’ve got a much bigger problem than low complexity passwords.
Key derivation algorithms are still hashes in most practical ways. Though they’re derived directly from block ciphers in most cases, so you could also say they’re encrypted. Even though people say to hash passwords, not encrypt them.
I find the whole terminology here to be unenlightening. It obscures more than it understands.
A KDF is not reversible so it’s not encryption (a bad one can be brute forced or have a collision, but that’s different from decrypting it even if the outcome is effectively the same). As long as you’re salting (and ideally peppering) your passwords and the iteration count is sufficiently high, any sufficiently long password will be effectively unrecoverable via any known means (barring a flaw being found in the KDF).
The defining characteristic that separates hashing from encryption is that for hashing there is no inverse function that can take the output and one or more extra parameters (secrets, salts, etc.) and produce the original input, unlike with encryption.
OK. How do you reconcile that with “Hashing passwords isn’t even the best practice at this point”? Key derivation functions are certainly the recommended approach these days. If they are hashes, then your earlier post is wrong, and if they aren’t hashes, then your next post was wrong.
The rest of that sentence is important. Hashing passwords is the minimum practice, not best practice. You should always be at least hashing passwords. Best practice would be salting and peppering them as well as picking a strong hashing function with as high a number of iterations as you can support. You would then pair that with 2FA (not SMS based), and a minimum password length of 16 with no maximum length.
Lots of older databases had fixed length fields, and you had to pad it if it was smaller. VARCHAR is a relatively new thing. So it’s not just saving space, but that old databases tended to force the issue.
Nobody has an excuse today. Even Cobol has variable length strings.
Can you elaborate further? Why would someone want to truncate passwords to begin with?
To save a few megabytes of text in a database somewhere. Likely the same database that gets hacked.
Which shouldn’t even matter because passwords are salted and hashed before storing them, so you’re not actually saving anything. At least they better be. If you’re not hashing passwords you’ve got a much bigger problem than low complexity passwords.
The place that truncates passwords is probably not the place to look for best practices when it comes to security. :-)
Hashing passwords isn’t even best practice at this point, it’s the minimally acceptable standard.
Sorta. Not really.
Key derivation algorithms are still hashes in most practical ways. Though they’re derived directly from block ciphers in most cases, so you could also say they’re encrypted. Even though people say to hash passwords, not encrypt them.
I find the whole terminology here to be unenlightening. It obscures more than it understands.
A KDF is not reversible so it’s not encryption (a bad one can be brute forced or have a collision, but that’s different from decrypting it even if the outcome is effectively the same). As long as you’re salting (and ideally peppering) your passwords and the iteration count is sufficiently high, any sufficiently long password will be effectively unrecoverable via any known means (barring a flaw being found in the KDF).
The defining characteristic that separates hashing from encryption is that for hashing there is no inverse function that can take the output and one or more extra parameters (secrets, salts, etc.) and produce the original input, unlike with encryption.
OK. How do you reconcile that with “Hashing passwords isn’t even the best practice at this point”? Key derivation functions are certainly the recommended approach these days. If they are hashes, then your earlier post is wrong, and if they aren’t hashes, then your next post was wrong.
The rest of that sentence is important. Hashing passwords is the minimum practice, not best practice. You should always be at least hashing passwords. Best practice would be salting and peppering them as well as picking a strong hashing function with as high a number of iterations as you can support. You would then pair that with 2FA (not SMS based), and a minimum password length of 16 with no maximum length.
Lots of older databases had fixed length fields, and you had to pad it if it was smaller.
VARCHARis a relatively new thing. So it’s not just saving space, but that old databases tended to force the issue.Nobody has an excuse today. Even Cobol has variable length strings.