Where should salt hash values come from?

Question

When adding salt values to a hash value for something like a password that cannot be stored in plain text, what is the best place to get the salt values come from? For context, let us suppose this is for passwords on a webpage login.

Answer 1

I usually have a column created TIMESTAMP in a user table so I can see when the user registered. I don't like to add an additional column for Salt, so I use the timestamp column as salt:

SHA1(password + created)

Answer 2

Does it matter?

The salt serves two purposes. It makes it impractical to use large tables of prehashed passwords ("rainbow tables") and it makes identical passwords look different in the list of hashes. Making the identical passwords look different helps avoid a problem where several people are using one particular password, which is presumably a common weak one.

Therefore, each account should have its own unique salt, and the salts should not be overly predictable, in the sense that there won't be a group of salts that are likely to occur. (If many sites started at 1 and counted up, bad guys could construct rainbow tables including low-number salts, for example.) They don't have to be random in any sense other than generally unpredictable. They aren't any more secret than the hash itself, so they don't need to be specifically unguessable.

Use any convenient method to generate a salt. If there's lots of potential salt values (early Unix systems frequently used two bytes, for a possible number of 65536) compared to the number of accounts, semi-random assignment would almost never give out a duplicate salt.

Answer 3

Each time you want to store a new password (registration, password-reset, password-update), one good technique is:

• generate new salt
  • use a cryptographically-secure pseudo-random number generator
  • use a decent size salt - a good value is the block size of the underlying hash algorithm (might be SHA-256)
• generate a new password token
  • create an hmac function from the underlying hash algorithm (might be SHA-256) using the salt as the hmac key
  • for i in (0...65536) { password = hmac(password) }
  • the result of the iterated applications of the hmac function is the password token
• store the salt and the password token
  • do not store the original password
  • optionally store the underlying hash algorithm and the stretches for discoverability

Answer 4

Leverage the framework. In .NET you could use the RNGCryptoServoiceProvider...

        // If salt is not specified, generate it on the fly.
        if (saltBytes == null)
        {
            // Define min and max salt sizes.
            int minSaltSize = 4;
            int maxSaltSize = 8;

            // Generate a random number for the size of the salt.
            Random  random = new Random();
            int saltSize = random.Next(minSaltSize, maxSaltSize);

            // Allocate a byte array, which will hold the salt.
            saltBytes = new byte[saltSize];

            // Initialize a random number generator.
            RNGCryptoServiceProvider rng = new RNGCryptoServiceProvider();

            // Fill the salt with cryptographically strong byte values.
            rng.GetNonZeroBytes(saltBytes); 
        }

Other frameworks should have similar classes you can leverage. To achieve randomness software often times employs the user versus Random as mentioned above. Randomly moving a mouse around in a defined area to provide salt is an option employed by TrueCrypt. It boils down to your specific needs and level of security; since your salt could simply be !@#$%.

Answer 5

You generate a salt server-side and assign it to a user account upon its creation. Better use some crypto-generation API available with your framework but in principle any sequence will do.

Usually things are stored like this:

User
-------------------
ID
Username
PasswordHashWithSalt

Example:

PasswordHashWithSalt =

A15CD9652D4F4A3FB61A2A422AEAFDF0DEA4E703 j5d58k4b56s8744q