why would someone in 2024 reach for bcrypt for building a secure hash key?
The main attack vector these days is GPU-based compute. There, SHA* algorithms are particularly weak because they can be so efficiently computed. Unlike SHA algorithms, bcrypt generates high memory contention, even on modern GPUs.
Add in the constraint of broad support, low "honest use" cost, and maturity (extensive hostile cryptanalysis), bcrypt stays as one of the better choices even 25 year later.
That said, bcrypt's main limitation is it has a low memory-size cost. There are some newer algorithms that improve on bcrypt by increasing the memory-size cost to more than is practical even for FPGA attacks.
More importantly, bcrypt didn't actually fail here. The vulnerability happened because okta didn't use it correctly. All crypto is insecure if you use it wrong enough.
i understand performance concerns and design trade offs, but i would expect a secure hashing function in 2024 to do proper message scheduling and compression or return errors when truncations are happening.
i suppose 90s culture is hip again these days, so maybe this does make sense?
2024-07-23 - Vulnerability introduced as part of a standard Okta release
This issue is not an "okta is old" issue. this was new code written in 2024 that used a password hashing function from 1999 as a cache key.