Hacker News Reader

Comment by lawnchair_larry | Hacker News Reader

The Use bcrypt rant comes up on HN a lot, but I've actually never seen a website that uses bcrypt or PBKDF2 in the real world. Hell, I rarely encounter developers or admins who even know what it is. I doubt it was more than md5+salt, but maybe.

Edit: I should clarify - there certainly are examples of bcrypt being used, and I know there are tools available. But pick several random websites that have forums or user accounts and the number actually using it will be very small. That has been my experience once exposed to the code/infrastructure anyway.

View on HN

PBKDF2 will be in Django 1.4:

https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/15367

edit Let me also add... this is for auth/password hashing, not data encryption. To any people reading this: if you don't understand the difference, and you are responsible for writing web applications, then please read up on it.

The data that Valve was storing (CC info) needs to be encrypted and I'm assuming that data then needs to be unencryptable. They have to store the key because they have to be able to recover the plain text. With password hashing, you will never need to be able to recover the password.

Also, if you're using Django, consider Playdoh:

https://github.com/mozilla/playdoh

It's what we use at Mozilla as the basis for most of our Django-based stuff, and gets you bcrypt password hashing -- even on older Django releases -- for free, along with some other niceties that probably need to find their way upstream soon :)

Very interesting stuff - thanks!

I can't speak for many, but at least reddit (https://github.com/reddit/reddit/commit/a311805c8598232b14a4...), and Hipmunk do

Happened a bit too late for reddit, though :p

Any modern Rails app is very likely using bcrypt to store password hashes. It's baked into most of the popular auth frameworks.

It's actually now baked into rails itself. You can declare

    has_secure_password

in the model and you're away.

Why would you have to declare it?

Because it adds a few attributes (like 'password') and methods (like 'authenticate') to your model, and you might not really want such things on every one of your models.

Clarification: has_secure_password does NOT mean you choose between secure or non-secure password, it just mean "I want a password on this model, and better make it secure guys!"

We see bcrypt and/or PBKDF2 regularly.

Counterexample: I've recently been playing with http://brubeck.io/ and it uses bcrypt as the default: https://github.com/j2labs/brubeck/blob/master/brubeck/auth.p...

Wow, that's probably the first web framework I've seen that is more polished than the server it runs on top of; my experience with mongrel2 is that it's still a bit rough around the edges.

I administer a community news and public affairs site. Early this year, after reading about bcrypt on hacker news, I witched the site authentication to bcrypt from salted md4 hash. http://raisethehammer.org/blog/2084

The statement "I've actually never seen a website that uses bcrypt or PBKDF2 in the real world" doesn't discredit the "Use bcrypt[/PBKDF2]" argument, though.

I think you'll probably find a whole lot of examples if you use a dataset of websites, webapps, and desktop/server apps made in the last decade. I work in business and enterprise application development, from simple webapps to complex systems on massive servers and I've been using and evangelizing bcrypt use around my circle for quite some time. At this point, most of the people I've encountered that are in charge of systems needing some type of encryption for their user data use bcrypt. I think most of the decent developers around the world already know of the perils of using weak encryption algorithms.

It is extremely easy to use bcrypt. http://www.openwall.com/phpass/

In a lame web service / trivia game I created for a distributed systems graduate class I used bcrypt. https://github.com/bgianfo/distributed-systems

The company I am with just moved from plaintext in-database password storage to using bcrypt with their latest product release, FWIW. It was either that or I left, heh.

Since it was just as easy as any other way I used bcrypt for my site. Seems common as of a year ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com