What We Do in the /etc/shadow – Cryptography with Passwords
I notice the article stopped citing examples of large-scale password cracking after the introduction of PBKDF2.<p>Technical tours through the winding passages of password management in services is fun and all, but I wonder if this is ultimately contributing more to bad habits than good ones.<p>Readers capable of implementing something like OPAQUE will already have a pretty good handle on most of what&#x27;s written here. All other developers will just grab whatever &quot;the&quot; off-the-shelf solution is for their language and tech stack, and any recommendations for those are conspicuously absent here. What are the best resources for the most popular tech stacks currently? PHP introduced the password_hash() function (and related functions) in its standard library a while back. It defaults to bcrypt, and most php devs should probably just use those functions, unless they&#x27;re sure they know better.<p>There&#x27;s another end of all this that I also never see addressed in writeups like this one: lots of users are still really bad at passwords. I still have a few friends that obsessively write passwords down on index cards and rotate the same weak passwords through all the services they use. I have installed password managers for them; I have walked through using password managers multiple times; I have explained the risks half a dozen times, with a different strategy each time. As the blogger says, &quot;passwords suck&quot;. Ultimately people like this keep reusing crappy passwords everywhere because <i>services don&#x27;t prevent it</i>, and in that case, it mostly doesn&#x27;t matter which fancypants algorithm you go with for handling authentication.<p>For a while, some misguided sites tried to prevent people from pasting passwords into their login forms. I have never seen the inverse: a site that prevents users from <i>typing</i> a password. Is there a reason that wouldn&#x27;t work? Because if it would, it would only take a few big services doing that to finally force the last holdouts to adopt password managers. And that, I think, would contribute a lot more to overall password security than trying to decide whether to use bcrypt, scrypt, pbkdf2, argon, or hokeypokey5.