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A better argument for per-user, randomly-chosen-at-password-change-time salts is so that you can't determine that two users (currently or historically from a password history) are using the same password by comparing the hashes.

If you knew that a hash was used many times over in a system, then you'd try cracking that password first to get access to the most accounts.

With salting you don't get to prioritize, or compare to previous information trivially.



I don't think that's a "better argument". I think it's a second, also good, argument that I didn't repeat because it's been mentioned by several other people.

Your argument is about protecting trivial passwords. It's quite common for people to independently come up with the same crappy passwords - the adobe "crossword puzzle" leak was a particularly interesting example of that.

My argument is about protecting moderately good passwords. If you use, for example, PBKDF2 with a fixed salt and have a million users, an attacker can try close to a million times as many passwords vs random salts.

You can still prioritize cracking with salted passwords in many cases. Say you had a dump of hashes form hackernews, and they were bcrypted with random salts. You'd go after the admin accounts first, then the well known accounts with a lot of influence, then everybody else.


That's the exact same argument, phrased differently.




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