I'm a (near complete) beginner, and this is my first foray into encryption - in fact this is probably the first time I use the word.
Here is my question: For a non banking / military, or even commercial, web app, what is the right way to choose a salt for a hash function used for passwords?
I can easily generate a pseudo random salt for each new user, and append that salt to their pw before applying the hash function. But I still need to store the salt so presumably anyone who gets access to the hashed passwords also gets the salts.
Is the benefit of the salt simply to make the pw "more random", and therefore defeat the standard dictionary-based rainbow tables?
Would any of the following be good & practical ideas:
- Store the salt in a separate db - maybe a separate system, definitely a different host, name, pw, etc.
- Generate the salt based on a hash of a user name (or first+last name, or sign up date), presumably using a different hash function? Then the salt itself would not be stored in the db - only the data used to compute it would...
- Store in the db a value which concatenates the hashed pw and the salt, in a non obvious manner (e.g., the salt is 10 random keys, and they are injected inside the hashed pw between letter numbers 1&2, 4&5, 8&9, etc).
As a side question, how easy is it to change a salted hash algorithm when upgrading the software of the website? It feels nightmarish right now.