[Cryptography] The proper way to hash password files

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 26 May 2014, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> On Thu, 22 May 2014, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> 
> > It occurs to me that most of the time, machines do password files wrong. 
> > Rather than using a salted hash, a better approach would be to use a MAC 
> > with a randomly chosen key that is never disclosed.
> 
> Giggle.  In the really early days of Unix, passwords were stored in the 
> clear, in a world-unreadable file, but using a temporary file for 
> intermediate processing.  Then, one day, it picked the same file as did a 
> text editor, and the emperor suddenly had no clothes...  Major oops.

Oops - it was CTSS at MIT.

-- Dave