[Cryptography] CSPRNG for password salt

John B vertex.vr4 at gmail.com
Tue Aug 19 21:43:50 EDT 2014


Hi all,

Some research on the interwebs turned up the recommendation that a password
hash's salt should only be generated with a cryptographically secure PRNG.
Some sources specifically mention *not* using rand() and friends.

What are the reasons for this? Specifically:
a) What is the attack on a password hash generated with non-CSPRNG salt
such as a rand() call?
b) How realistic/plausible is such an attack?

So that the responses don't 'wander', I'd like to state that I am already
aware of:
a) The point of a salt
b) The fact that the salts need to be of an appropriate length
c) Bcrypt, scypt and PBKDF2 are the appropriate types for password hashes

Regards,
John
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