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Comment by ben0x539 | Hacker News Reader

> Although passwords are stored using SHA1 with a salt,

Where's the bcrypt/scrypt/whatever police in this comments thread?

I already asked in the comments of the original article how many rounds of sha1 are used. SHA-1 still isn't the best, since it yields to FPGA attacks, but a single round can brute-force all 8 character passwords in less than 2 days on a GPU. My guess is that 10k rounds of sha-1 would probably not be feasible for non-dictionary attacks without specialized hardware.

GPUs that Bitcoin miners would certainly have around. Not saying that this is what happened, but it got me wondering.

The article mentions salted SHA-1, which is much more resistant to attack.

Obviously, more rounds and unique salts per user would yield better results, regardless of the hashing scheme employed.

You can salt all you want, but an 8 character password with a single round is going to fall very, very fast. Salt, being public, has nothing to do with it.

It does however mean you have to spend two days per password, rather than two days for the entire user base, or ten minutes with a pre-existing lookup table.

No, consumer GPUs can do almost a billion SHA1 hashes per second now. We're talking seconds to minutes for "complex" passwords, not days.

http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/

Well using SHA1 with a salt is a lot closer to bcrypt than plaintext or encrypting the passwords.

In my opinion it is not. Here is the common use case for people: 66% of them use 8 character or less passwords. Forget about the common longer passwords like "letmeinplz" just doing a brute force would give them 66%. In terms of loss, even 1% of passwords being compromised is bad since many people use the same password for multiple things.

Now, how long would it take for people to take down bcrypt? in the scale of time bcrypt is all the way over there -> from SHA1 and cleartext. Bcrypt will protect you even as computers get faster. SHA1 a couple decades from now will be be compromised for 9 or maybe even 10 characters. No way with bcrypt.

Your second point makes no sense, bcrypt factors are manually increased and require a new write for every item in the store. If we time capsule the SHA1 hashed db of passwords and the Bcrypt db for 10 years you cannot prove that the SHA1 database will be more easily compromised than the Bcrypt database. There may be a cryptographic break in blowfish in the time.

They don't mention a work factor for their SHA1 hash storage, they could be using PBKDF2 for all we know.

If you're looking for something to pick on about Linode here, go after something else, this isn't the worst thing to come out today.

Trying to find some official information to figure out the status of our own 'nodes. :-(

official announcement: http://status.linode.com/2012/03/manager-security-incident.h...

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