I am facing the never ending problem How to store passwords in DB?. As far as I read recently there ware a few of the previously considered safe algorithms, which had been marked as insecure. So I am struggling to find a up-to-date resource which describes the ones that are not secure any more.
I was thinking of combining two or three algos, but I remember back in the day it was considered insecure, i.e exposes the hash to attacks. The combination I was thinking of was something like that:
data_h1 = sha256(sha1(data_salt).sha1([username|email]).sha1(data_peper))
data_h2 = sha256(sha1(data_salt).sha1(user_entered_password).sha1(data_pepper))
hmac(
sha512,
data,
sha512(general_salt.data_h1.data_h2.general_pepper)
);
Where data_salt and data_pepper are constants, hard-coded in to the application, but are different than general_salt and general_pepper which are as well hard-coded constants. [username|email] is the value supplied by the user on registration and when logging in, as well as *user_entered_password* (doh!).
Will this compromise security in some way? (if no go to next)
Will there be a major bottleneck due to the hash-o-mania which will be going on in the process of generation? (go to next)
Any recommendations on the approach showed above?
My questions goes for PHP, but will be good to see what will you guys recommend and what will your comments be in general, b`cuz I do think that this is very common task, and many people still use only MD5 or SHA1 (or better yet, storing in plain text).
The main reason not to use SHA-1 or SHA-256 alone for hashing passwords is that
they are fast, relatively speaking. Password authentication is vulnerable to dictionary
attacks and brute-force attacks, since users tend to include common words in their passwords
and use relatively short passwords, making them easier to guess than encryption keys.
Hash functions like bcrypt and PBKDF2 are recommended because they are slow.
They can be tuned to take almost any amount of time; it should take as long as
possible to hash a password without causing unreasonable delay. This will help slow
dictionary attacks and brute force attacks.
However, this is not the only security consideration for password storage.
When "storing" passwords you do not actually store the password, you store its one-way hash. The reason for this is to prevent even someone with access to the system from learning a user's password. The "one way" aspect of the hash means that, while it is possible to create a hash from the plaintext, it is impossible to learn the plaintext from the hash.
In addition, all passwords should be concatenated with salt (a random sequence of digits) before being hashed. The salt value should be stored along with the hash in the database. The salt must be ROW-SPECIFIC, i.e. every password should have its own salt.
Why must hashes be row-specific? Imagine a hacker has somehow obtained a copy of your database. Normally he's up against a pretty big brute force task. If you have only one hash, the hacker can examine all the rows and find rows that occur the most frequently, because the same password + the same salt always renders the same hash. So with this information he can guess that those rows contain commonly-used passwords. He can then use that information to reduce the size of his brute force problem. Or he can try to learn one of those users' passwords and then be able to use that password on any of the other users' accounts that have the same hash. The whole point of the salt is to prevent attacks of that nature.
Use a decent one-way cryptographically secure hash with a user-specific salt. That is the standard means of storing passwords.
The addition of application-specific "pepper" (which is the same every row, and must be cryptographically random and held in a secure location) tranforms the hash into an HMAC (Hash-Based Message Authentication Code), which is even better. If someone knows your hashing algorithm and salt but doesn't know the pepper, he will have a much harder time guessing the password.
Related
So recently I have been doing tons of research on how to secure passwords. I believe I understand the basics of it. As such I am attempting to write my own function to secure a password in php.
But I am somewhat confused when it comes to salting a password. We create a random unique salt and append it to a password and then hash it, and finally store the unhashed salt and hashed password/salt combination together in the database. This increases the search space of the hacker if he obtains access to the database and our hashed passwords.
So this seems like complete overkill of security, but everywhere I see the salt is always appended to the front or back of the password anyways. So looking at a SINGLE user's password this unique salt doesn't affect the search space does it? Although since each user has a unique salt the overall search space of EVERY user is dramatically increased.
Wouldn't it be more secure to create an algorithm that inserts the salt to a predictable, semi-random place in the password such as the length of the username/2? For example here is the steps of my proposed securing function:
Create a random salt
take username length %(mod) password length
insert the salt at the spot determined
hash
Example run:
random salt = 12345
len("imauserwithalongname") % len("mypass") = 2
valueToHash = my12345pass
Now our cracker has no idea where to put the salt without seeing our php/source, which (correct me if I am wrong) is much harder to gain access to than the database.
Also I know security should depend on the security of the key not secrecy of the algorithm, however I see nothing wrong with adding layers based on it, as long as the entire system does not depend on secrecy of the algorithm.
EDIT: Would doing this dramatically increase the search space of a cracker?
And what if we placed the salt in a place that depended on the length of the password, would that not destroy the purpose of using dictionary attacks, even on a per user basis?
Inserting the salt in a different spot doesn't increase the search space. If you are using a random salt for each user, a hacker does not know what each salt is per user anyway. The knowledge of its position in the unhashed string doesn't matter.
Use bcrypt or PBKDF2. Both algorithms enforce a salt and number of cycles. If you're patient enough, PHP 5.5 will just let you do password_hash($password).
As such I am attempting to write my own function to secure a password
in php.
Woah woah, hold it right there.
There's a saying passed down from cryptographers to us mere mortals which has held true for many many years. The saying goes like this:
Do not invent your own crypto.
Say it out loud, then say it again.
I know you're only trying to secure your passwords, but I had to get that out of the way. There are lots and lots of tried and tested methods to do what you want to achieve.
I appreciate you've done some research, but the internet is full of terrible terrible information, so I'm going to point you towards some useful articles.
Check out ircmaxell's security related
blogs.
A nice short list.
Here's some keywords to help you.
Bcrypt
Scrypt (someone please unstrike this when PHP supports it)
Again a very short list.
To address your specific concern. Salts are not needed to be kept private, as you say they are designed to stop attackers precomputing tables of valid password/hash combinations. However if you use a weak hashing algorithm they lose their value very quickly.
Security through obscurity is not as great as it seems. If a hacker gains access to your DB, the odds are quite high that they will also gain access to your filesystem. If they gain access to your source your custom method of storing passwords is a moot point.
In summary, custom algorithm + weak hash = insecure.
Instead you want to use tried and tested key derivation functions / key strengthening algorithms.
These are designed to make the computer work really hard to generate the hash, and makes it very difficult for an attacker to brute force a password.
Bcrypt stores the salt next to the password, and is proven to be very secure. Secure enough in fact that it is currently the recommended way to hash passwords by security experts.
In PHP 5.5 a simple password hashing API has been introduced based on Bcrypt, and for versions under 5.5 there is a password hashing compatibility library that does exactly the same thing.
That should be enough for you.
I personally think you're overdoing it. The most efficient way to salt a hash would be to have a dynamic, record-specif one AND a static one stored in a read-only file on the system. This is a very efficient yet secure way of salting hashes.
I think you misunderstood the purpose of the salt. The salt does not increase the search space for an attacker, after all it is stored plaintext with the hash-value. The purpose of a salt is, that an attacker cannot build one single rainbowtable, and then retrieve all stored passwords.
If you would append the same salt to every password, then the attacker cannot simply use an existing precalculated rainbow-table from the internet, he has to build a new rainbow-table for exactly this salt (existing rainbow-tables will contain passwords like "horse", but not passwords like horse8ze*w398dhek3+qmxno0). Unfortunately this single rainbow-table can then be used to get all passwords.
So we use a unique salt for every password. An attacker would have to build a separate rainbow-table for each password now, but why should he continue with building the table, when he already found a match (?), he cannot reuse the table later for other passwords. In other words, brute-force is faster than building a rainbow-table, so we made rainbow-tables useless.
So the salt should be unique for each password and if possible it should be unpredictable. Those criterias are difficult to fulfill with a deterministic computer, the best you can do is, to use the random source of the operating system to build the salts. Good hash algorithms for passwords like BCrypt and PBKDF2 repeat the hashing to become slow, and combine password and original salt in each iteration. It is not just a concatenation of password + salt.
Your idea about putting the salt somewhere secret does add a secret (where is the salt?), that will work as long as the attacker doesnt know your code. Getting the database (SQL-injection) is indeed easier than gaining access to the code, but the same goal can be achieved much easier with a pepper.
I tried to sum up this in a tutorial, maybe you want to have a look at it.
I'm starting a website and I'm trying to decide how to encrypt user passwords to store them in a SQL database.
I realize that using a simple md5(password) is very unsecured. I'm considering using a sha512(password.salt), and I have been researching the best way to generate a useful salt.
I read numerous articles stating that a salt should be as random as possible to add entropy to the hash and it looks like a great idea. But:
you need to store the random salt along with your hash
given that an attacker somehow got access to your hashed passwords (and is trying to reverse the hash to plain text), it means he probably dumped your database, then got access to your random salts also
Isn't it obvious that the weird looking value next to the hash in the database is a salt? If the attacker can access the salt along with the hash value, how is that more secure?
Anyone has any expertise in that area? Thanks!
An attacker is "allowed" to know the salt - your security must be designed in a way that even with the knowledge of the salt it is still secure.
What does the salt do ?
Salt aids in defending against brute-force attacks using pre-computed "rainbow-tables".
Salt makes brute-force much more expensive (in time/memory terms) for the attacker.
Calculating such a table is expensive and usually only done when it can be used for more than one attack/password.
IF you use the same salt for all password an attacker could pre-compute such a table and then brute-force your passwords into cleartext...
As long as you generate a new (best cryptogrpahically strong) random salt for every password you want to store the hash of there is no problem.
IF you want to strengthen the security further
You could calculate the hash several times over (hash the hash etc.) - this doesn't cost you much but it makes a brute-force attack / calculating "rainbow-tables" even more expensive... please don't invent yourself - there are proven standard methods to do so, see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBKDF2 and http://www.itnewb.com/tutorial/Encrypting-Passwords-with-PHP-for-Storage-Using-the-RSA-PBKDF2-Standard
NOTE:
Using such a mechanism is these days mandatrory since "CPU time" (usable for attacks like rainbow tables/brute force etc.) is getting more and more widely available (see for example the fact that Amazon's Cloud service is among the top 50 of fastest supercomuters worldwide and can be used by anyone for a comparatively small amount)!
given that an attacker somehow got access to your hashed passwords
(and is trying to reverse the hash to plain text), it means he
probably dumped your database, then got access to your random salts
also
The whole point of salting is to defeat "rainbow tables":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table
See why a sufficiently long salt defeats any rainbow table under the section "Defense against rainbow tables".
how is that more secure?
It used to be more secure because it forced the attacker to try a, back then, very costly brute-force approach instead of an instant looked in precomputed rainbow tables. If you had a 64 bit salt, the attacker needed to have 2^64 precomputed rainbow tables instead of one... In other words: it made rainbow tables useless.
Note however that modern GPUs can crack billions of passwords per second making it mostly pointless for an attacker to store huge rainbow tables (instead of storing billions of hashes, simply compute them in a few seconds).
Nowadays you want to store your "passwords" using something like PBKDF2 or scrypt.
The strength of your hashed, salted passwords rely on all of the following factors:
The strength of the hashing algorithm
The randomness of the salt
The randomness of the password
Your system is as strong as the weakest of the above.
The questions below are from the sister site Security StackExchange. They discuss hashing, salts, PBKDF2, bcrypt, scrypt, and a few other things.
How to securely hash passwords?
Do any security experts recommend bcrypt for password storage?
There's also some previous discussion from here on StackOverflow as well:
Is BCrypt a good hashing algorithm to use in C#? Where can I find it?
In short answer to you question, a salt is a safeguard that makes it take a long time to recover a password in the event of compromise just as a hash is. If attacking one password, the salt won't make a difference. If trying to use a pre-computed dictionary or test many passwords at the same time, having a different salt for each entry will greatly increase the amount of work needed and generally make generating a suitable rainbow table infeasible.
Here's a good article on cryptography: http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2012/02/introduction-to-strong-cryptography-p1.html
See the section Real World Usage of Hash Algorithms, Scenario 1 for discussion of the salt.
I highly recommend using http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/security/SecureRandom.html to generate your salt
Is there any working difference between
$hash=sha1($key.$staticSalt);
and
$hash=sha1($key.$randomSalt);
If i use random salt i need to store the random salt in the database, on the other side if i use a fixed salt then no need to use DB !
And if the code can be hacked to see the salt (static) then the hacker will be able to see the database also with the hash and random salt :D
So does it worth it ?
What if i use a salt like ##kiss~89+.&&^me ?
Random salts have a tremendous benefit. If all accounts in the system use the same salt, an attacker can brute-force calculate hashes for that salt and break into all accounts with just one computational run. If they use different salts per account, brute-force only gets you into one account.
While best practice for password storage dictates that they should be stored in a hashed format with a unique salt, the original question actually raises a reasonably good point: if you store the salt in a different location to the hashes, the impact of those hashes being disclosed is lowered.
1) If the passwords were only hashed, and stored in a database, and the site suffered from SQL Injection then an attacker could "crack" the hashes
2) If the passwords were hashed with a salt, and the both hash and salt were in the database, and the site had SQL Injection then an attacker could "crack" the hashes, but would require more computational effort (as there is no performance boost from pre-computed tables)
3) If the passwords were hashes with a salt, and the salt was stored elsewhere, then SQL Injection would afford an attacker little leverage to ascertain the actual password.
Scenario 1 is obviously weakest, but the difference in security between 2 and 3 is less clear-cut, and depends on the relative probabilities of SQL Injection vs server-side code disclosure (and associated classes of vulnerability).
What do you trust more - your ability to protect against SQL Injection, or the ability of Apache/PHP/Whatever to protect your server-side content.
Things are never simple and I actually think the idea in the OP makes more sense than other answers give credit for.
(You could use both, a salt stored in database and a "key" if you like stored in the web app source, when generating passwords).
A salt is be random by definition; there is no such thing as a 'static salt'. If it is not random, it's not a salt but a key.
The point of the salt is to make sure the attacker has to mount a separate attack for each password he/she wants to crack. In other words, the point of salting a hash is to prevent precomputation attacks (rainbow tables).
The easy solution for getting it right is to use a standard library instead of cutting corners
Always use random salt for each password.
If you don't then the benefit of having the salt is lost. If you use the same salt, then in the case when website gets compromised, the hacker can use same hash table for hacking all the passwords in your userlist. If salt is random, then they have to use different hash table for each user.
I 'm not sure if you are salting correctly -- the purpose of a salt is to foil precomputed dictionary attacks if your database is compromised. Therefore you are using a database to begin with, so what does your "no need to use the DB" comment mean?
If you are not using a random salt, then you don't make it more difficult for the attacker to attack your hashes if they get their hand on the salt. You will be better off using a random salt -- you won't need to keep it hidden for your security to work.
The salt also does not need to be long or unusual. "rK" is a good salt. "1q" is also good. Its purpose is simply to vary the output of the hash function.
I am seeking advice on how to securely store passwords in MySQL using PHP.
Overlooking the limitations of PHP itself, I want to know more about salting, hashing, and encrypting these bad boys.
Obviously people will continue to use weak passwords unless forced to do otherwise, but it's how I am storing them that is important to me. My user's passwords are far more important to me than the database itself, and as such I want to keep them in such a way that it will be painstaking and monotonous for any script kiddie trying reverse. Obviously with due diligence just about anything can be defeated, but I wouldn't mind making this particularly bothersome.
There are two scenarios we are looking at.
The kiddie has a complete copy of the database.
The kiddie has a complete copy of the PHP used to craft the password, and the database.
Any and all advice on this topic is graciously appreciated.
Use bcrypt. If someone has the user table of your database, then they can use brute force/rainbow tables/etc to their heart's content. Even with salt, if you're using MD5 or some other fast-hashing algorithm (which aren't designed to solve this problem, by the way); it's just a matter of time before it can be cracked.
Any well-known and widely-supported hashing algorithm is going to have this same basic "flaw" (if you can call it that; it's really by definition). The difference is that bcrypt is slow as molasses when performing the hashing operation, rendering a brute force attack much less effective.
For an absolutely great discussion on the merits of bcrypt, the dangers of other approaches, and the difficulty of password security in general, read this thread. It has lots of comments by many people that are much more knowledgeable about this sort of thing than I am, and it should hopefully help you understand more of the issues at stake.
Assuming you're using username and password as authentication tokens you can safely store the following to ensure the data can't be compromised.
Username (in plaintext)
Salt (random string)
Salted Hash (sha1(username + salt + password))
Using the scheme, an attacker cannot use rainbow tables against you and the passwords are not recoverable by any (reasonable) means. (That is, as long as your attacker isn't the government)
Even though the attacker has the salt and hash pairs it's not possible to use rainbow tables because all the possible hashes will need to be computed anyway, using the salt that they've been given, so it's a brand new brute force attack for each user.
Even with the source code and attacker won't be able to get hold of the passwords because the strength/security is in the hashing algorithm, not your code.
Combine this with using bcrypt as per Donut's answer and you're really quite safe. That is:
Username (in plaintext)
Salt (random string)
Salted Hash (bcrypt(username + salt + password))
Taking advice from here, for added fun you can dynamically change your salt as well. For example, use different salts for usernames of different length, use the user's registration date as the salt. This makes it that even if someone DOES get to your database, they can't just re-generate the hash, they have to calculate a hash table for each salt that you used.
If your users are over the internet, OpenId would be one of your best options. http://openid.net/
If your users are on your network, can you do Integrated Security?
In other words.. do not store their passwords.
Usually "salted" passwords (like with bcrypt) mean that not the password itself is stored, but only something like
salt
hash(salt with password appended)
Now if the kiddie has your database (and of course, the code - there is no point in keeping the code secret), he/she can only guess passwords, calculate the salted hash, and compare. If the hash function is expensive (like bcrypt is), than guessing is expensive too.
It's simple
store(sha256("somesalt" + password));
And nobody will be able to reverse it :)
See also: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3897434/password-security-sha1-sha256-or-sha512
I'm making a php login, and I'm trying to decide whether to use SHA1 or Md5, or SHA256 which I read about in another stackoverflow article. Are any of them more secure than others? For SHA1/256, do I still use a salt?
Also, is this a secure way to store the password as a hash in mysql?
function createSalt()
{
$string = md5(uniqid(rand(), true));
return substr($string, 0, 3);
}
$salt = createSalt();
$hash = sha1($salt . $hash);
Neither. You should use bcrypt. The hashes you mention are all optimized to be quick and easy on hardware, and so cracking them share the same qualities. If you have no other choice, at least be sure to use a long salt and re-hash multiple times.
Using bcrypt in PHP 5.5+
PHP 5.5 offers new functions for password hashing. This is the recommend approach for password storage in modern web applications.
// Creating a hash
$hash = password_hash($password, PASSWORD_DEFAULT, ['cost' => 12]);
// If you omit the ['cost' => 12] part, it will default to 10
// Verifying the password against the stored hash
if (password_verify($password, $hash)) {
// Success! Log the user in here.
}
If you're using an older version of PHP you really should upgrade, but until you do you can use password_compat to expose this API.
Also, please let password_hash() generate the salt for you. It uses a CSPRNG.
Two caveats of bcrypt
Bcrypt will silently truncate any password longer than 72 characters.
Bcrypt will truncate after any NUL characters.
(Proof of Concept for both caveats here.)
You might be tempted to resolve the first caveat by pre-hashing your passwords before running them through bcrypt, but doing so can cause your application to run headfirst into the second.
Instead of writing your own scheme, use an existing library written and/or evaluated by security experts.
Zend\Crypt (part of Zend Framework) offers BcryptSha
PasswordLock is similar to BcryptSha but it also encrypts the bcrypt hashes with an authenticated encryption library.
TL;DR - Use bcrypt.
I think using md5 or sha256 or any hash optimized for speed is perfectly fine and am very curious to hear any rebuttle other users might have. Here are my reasons
If you allow users to use weak passwords such as God, love, war, peace then no matter the encryption you will still be allowing the user to type in the password not the hash and these passwords are often used first, thus this is NOT going to have anything to do with encryption.
If your not using SSL or do not have a certificate then attackers listening to the traffic will be able to pull the password and any attempts at encrypting with javascript or the like is client side and easily cracked and overcome. Again this is NOT going to have anything to do with data encryption on server side.
Brute force attacks will take advantage weak passwords and again because you allow the user to enter the data if you do not have the login limitation of 3 or even a little more then the problem will again NOT have anything to do with data encryption.
If your database becomes compromised then most likely everything has been compromised including your hashing techniques no matter how cryptic you've made it. Again this could be a disgruntled employee XSS attack or sql injection or some other attack that has nothing to do with your password encryption.
I do believe you should still encrypt but the only thing I can see the encryption does is prevent people that already have or somehow gained access to the database from just reading out loud the password. If it is someone unauthorized to on the database then you have bigger issues to worry about that's why Sony got took because they thought an encrypted password protected everything including credit card numbers all it does is protect that one field that's it.
The only pure benefit I can see to complex encryptions of passwords in a database is to delay employees or other people that have access to the database from just reading out the passwords. So if it's a small project or something I wouldn't worry to much about security on the server side instead I would worry more about securing anything a client might send to the server such as sql injection, XSS attacks or the plethora of other ways you could be compromised. If someone disagrees I look forward to reading a way that a super encrypted password is a must from the client side.
The reason I wanted to try and make this clear is because too often people believe an encrypted password means they don't have to worry about it being compromised and they quit worrying about securing the website.
As Johannes Gorset pointed out, the post by Thomas Ptacek from Matasano Security explains why simple, general-purpose hashing functions such as MD5, SHA1, SHA256 and SHA512 are poor password hashing choices.
Why? They are too fast--you can calculate at least 1,000,000 MD5 hashes a second per core with a modern computer, so brute force is feasible against most passwords people use. And that's much less than a GPU-based cracking server cluster!
Salting without key stretching only means that you cannot precompute the rainbow table, you need to build it ad hoc for that specific salt. But it won't really make things that much harder.
User #Will says:
Everyone is talking about this like they can be hacked over the
internet. As already stated, limiting attempts makes it impossible to
crack a password over the Internet and has nothing to do with the
hash.
They don't need to. Apparently, in the case of LinkedIn they used the common SQL injection vulnerability to get the login DB table and cracked millions of passwords offline.
Then he goes back to the offline attack scenario:
The security really comes into play when the entire database is
compromised and a hacker can then perform 100 million password
attempts per second against the md5 hash. SHA512 is about 10,000 times
slower.
No, SHA512 is not 10000 times slower than MD5--it only takes about twice as much. Crypt/SHA512, on the other hand, is a very different beast that, like its BCrypt counterpart, performs key stretching, producing a very different hash with a random salt built-in and will take anything between 500 and 999999 times as much to compute (stretching is tunable).
SHA512 => aaf4c61ddcc5e8a2dabede0f3b482cd9aea9434d
Crypt/SHA512 => $6$rounds=5000$usesomesillystri$D4IrlXatmP7rx3P3InaxBeoomnAihCKRVQP22JZ6EY47Wc6BkroIuUUBOov1i.S5KPgErtP/EN5mcO.ChWQW21
So the choice for PHP is either Crypt/Blowfish (BCrypt), Crypt/SHA256 or Crypt/SHA512. Or at least Crypt/MD5 (PHK). See www.php.net/manual/en/function.crypt.php
Use SHA256. It is not perfect, as SHA512 would be ideal for a fast hash, but out of the options, its the definite choice. As per any hashing technology, be sure to salt the hash for added security.
As an added note, FRKT, please show me where someone can easily crack a salted SHA256 hash? I am truly very interested to see this.
Important Edit:
Moving forward please use bcrypt as a hardened hash. More information can be found here.
Edit on Salting:
Use a random number, or random byte stream etc. You can use the unique field of the record in your database as the salt too, this way the salt is different per user.
What people seem to be missing is that if the hacker has access to the database he probably also has access to the php file that hashes the password and can likely just modify that to send him all the successful user name password combos. If he doesn't have access to the web directory he could always just pick a password hash it, and write that into the database. In other words the hash algorithm doesn't really matter as much as system security, and limiting login attempts also if you don't use SSL then the attacker can just listen in on the connection to get the information. Unless you need the algorithm to take a long time to compute (for your own purposes) then SHA-256 or SHA-512 with a user specific salt should be enough.
As an added security measure set up a script (bash, batch, python, etc) or program and give it an obscure name and have it check and see if login.php has changed (check date/time stamp) and send you an email if it has. Also should probably log all attempts at login with admin rights and log all failed attempts to log into the database and have the logs emailed to you.
Everyone is talking about this like they can be hacked over the internet. As already stated, limiting attempts makes it impossible to crack a password over the Internet and has nothing to do with the hash.
The salt is a must, but the complexity or multiple salts doesn't even matter. Any salt alone stops the attacker from using a premade rainbow table. A unique salt per user stops the attacker from creating a new rainbow table to use against your entire user base.
The security really comes into play when the entire database is compromised and a hacker can then perform 100 million password attempts per second against the md5 hash. SHA512 is about 10,000 times slower. A complex password with today's power could still take 100 years to bruteforce with md5 and would take 10,000 times as long with SHA512. The salts don't stop a bruteforce at all as they always have to be known, which if the attacker downloaded your database, he probably was in your system anyway.
Here is the comparison between MD5 and SHA1. You can get a clear idea about which one is better.
MD5 is bad because of collision problems - two different passwords possibly generating the same md-5.
Sha-1 would be plenty secure for this. The reason you store the salted sha-1 version of the password is so that you the swerver do not keep the user's apassword on file, that they may be using with other people's servers. Otherwise, what difference does it make?
If the hacker steals your entire unencrypted database some how, the only thing a hashed salted password does is prevent him from impersonating the user for future signons - the hacker already has the data.
What good does it do the attacker to have the hashed value, if what your user inputs is a plain password?
And even if the hacker with future technology could generate a million sha-1 keys a second for a brute force attack, would your server handle a million logons a second for the hacker to test his keys? That's if you are letting the hacker try to logon with the salted sha-1 instead of a password like a normal logon.
The best bet is to limit bad logon attempts to some reasonable number - 25 for example, and then time the user out for a minute or two. And if the cumulative bady logon attempts hits 250 within 24 hours, shut the account access down and email the owner.
Use argon2i. The argon2 password hashing function has won the Password Hashing Competition.
Other reasonable choices, if using argon2 is not available, are scrypt, bcrypt and PBKDF2. Wikipedia has pages for these functions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argon2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBKDF2
MD5, SHA1 and SHA256 are message digests, not password-hashing functions. They are not suitable for this purpose.
Switching from MD5 to SHA1 or SHA512 will not improve the security of the construction so much. Computing a SHA256 or SHA512 hash is very fast. An attacker with common hardware could still try tens of millions (with a single CPU) or even billions (with a single GPU) of hashes per second. Good password hashing functions include a work factor to slow down dictionary attacks.
Here is a suggestion for PHP programmers: read the PHP FAQ then use password_hash().
Let's assume the next point : the hackers steal our database including the users and password (encrypted). And the hackers created a fake account with a password that they know.
MD5 is weak because its short and popular and practically every hash generation without password is weak of a dictionary attack. But..
So, let's say that we are still using MD5 with a SALT. The hackers don't know the SALT but they know the password of a specific user. So they can test : ?????12345 where 12345 is the know password and ????? is the salt. The hackers sooner or later can guess the SALT.
However, if we used a MD5+SALT and we applied MD5, then there is not way to recover the information. However, i repeat, MD5 is still short.
For example, let's say that my password is : 12345. The SALT is BILLCLINTON
md5 : 827ccb0eea8a706c4c34a16891f84e7b
md5 with the hash : 56adb0f19ac0fb50194c312d49b15378
mD5 with the hash over md5 : 28a03c0bc950decdd9ee362907d1798a I tried to use those online service and i found none that was able to crack it. And its only MD5! (may be as today it will be crackeable because i generated the md5 online)
If you want to overkill then SHA256 is more than enough if its applied with a salt and twice.
tldr MD5(HASH+MD5(password)) = ok but short, SHA256 is more than enough.
An md5 encryption is one of the worst, because you have to turn the code and it is already decrypted. I would recommend you the SHA256. I'm programming a bit longer and have had a good experience. Below would also be an encryption.
password_hash() example using Argon2i
<?php
echo 'Argon2i hash: ' . password_hash('rasmuslerdorf', PASSWORD_ARGON2I);
?>
The above example will output something similar to:
Argon2i hash: $argon2i$v=19$m=1024,t=2,p=2$YzJBSzV4TUhkMzc3d3laeg$zqU/1IN0/AogfP4cmSJI1vc8lpXRW9/S0sYY2i2jHT0