Hi Mirco, On 8 October 2026 19:04:33 BST, Mirco Babin <[email protected]> wrote:
>OWASP states, see >https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/Password_Storage_Cheat_Sheet.html#pre-hashing-passwords-with-bcrypt I looked up the attack discussed there, "password shucking" or "hash shucking", and as I understand it, it requires *the same inner hash* to be used somewhere else, that the attacker can match *to that user*. In the proposed algorithm, that means that somewhere else has passwords stored as HMAC-SHA256(salt, password) and has the same password, *and the same salt*, for the same user. Unless I'm missing something, that's staggeringly unlikely. To put it another way, the salt in the proposal's HMAC is essentially doing the same thing as the pepper in the OWASP suggestion - making it sufficiently unlikely that an attacker can find the exact inner hash they need somewhere else. I also see, in the section above that, that OWASP endorses Sjoerd's original proposal: > ... so you should enforce a maximum password length of 72 bytes Even an expert opinion is just an opinion, of course, but it does mean we're going in circles a bit. Regards, Rowan Tommins [IMSoP]
