Re: [R7-0035] VxWorks Authentication Library Weak Password Hashing

[Solar Designer <solar () openwall com>]

On Mon, Aug 02, 2010 at 11:55:05PM -0400, HD Moore wrote:
> -- Vendor Response:
> Wind River Systems has notified their customers of the issue and
> suggested that each downstream vendor replace the existing hash
> implementation with SHA512 or SHA256.

Like, without salting and stretching/strengthening?  That's not the best
suggestion.  I try to explain this without going into too much detail here:

http://www.openwall.com/articles/PHP-Users-Passwords#salting

At this time, vendors should implement either bcrypt (Blowfish-based):

http://www.openwall.com/crypt/

or SHA-crypt (usually the kind of it based on SHA-512, because that
makes better use of 64-bit CPUs):

http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/sha-crypt.html

There's almost no security difference between these two.  Both should
be replaced with something even better eventually - along the lines of
scrypt (adding more parallelism and configurable memory cost) - but
we're not ready for that yet (no peer-reviewed and agreed upon
implementation to recommend to vendors, even though some ideas in this
area have been floating around since 1990s).

Alexander