I'm in the process of creating a gaming community site that I'm aiming to release to the public soon. Currently, I'm working on passwords and logins. I've only used MD5 before, but I've read about password safety and heard that salting is currently the way to go.
Here's my plan: Every user has their own unique salt of 12 random characters (#/¤& etc), stored in the users table. The salt is hashed (using SHA-256) along with the password on registration, and re-hashed on login.
How does this sound to you? Anything I can improve? Should I go for SHA-512 and a longer salt, or is this enough?
Your suggestion of 12 bytes should be an adequate length for a salt. That would require a dictionary attack to prepare 296 databases of hashed passwords. Someday this might be a trivial operation for a cracker, but we're still a ways off from that.
SHA256 is recommended by NIST as having adequate hashing strength for passwords, at least for now.
If you want to explore even stronger methods of password security, look into key-strengthening techniques like PBKDF2, or adaptive hashing with Bcrypt. But these have no direct support in SQL. You'd have to do the hashing in application code and then post the hash digest to your database.
It may seem like security overkill for a gaming site, but it's a good practice to do it. Because many users (inadvisably) use the same password for their gaming login as they do for their banking login! You don't want to be responsible for an authentication breach that leads indirectly to major losses.
Update:
Don't use hashing or HMAC. Use bcrypt or scrypt. See http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/
Original:
Don't simply hash. Use HMAC. (And avoid doing your own hashing or crypto if there is a library available, since libraries benefit from expert input.)
References:
It's probably sufficient for your use case.
However, it could be improved by:
Increase the size of the salt
The salt should be not be limited to a small subset of characters
Iterate the hashing, say 1000 times (key strengthening)
Have a look at phpass.
I've noticed a lot of confusion about how to do password hashing properly, especially on stackoverflow. And I've seen some REALLY BAD recommendations. So I've written a page that should clear everything up. There's a bit more to it than using a simple hash.
More info and source code: How to do password hashing properly
Feel free to share this link whenever someone has a question about password hashing. This is my first post on stackoverflow so sorry if I'm not doing it right
If you are really concerned, I would look at using the whirlpool hashing function instead of one of the SHA variants. Whirlpool has proven to be an incredibly strong hashing method, and has no history of collisions or any other weaknesses (that I know of, at least).
You can use whirlpool by employing the hash function of PHP. (Note, however, that hash() requires PHP 5.1.2 or greater.)
Your current approach is enough.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3191690/how-long-should-my-password-salt-be-and-is-sha-256-good-enough