Password Hashing

Secret keys used to encrypt or sign confidential data have to be chosen from a very large keyspace.

However, passwords are usually short, human-generated strings, making dictionary attacks practical.

Password hashing functions derive a secret key of any size from a password and salt.

  • The generated key has the size defined by the application, no matter what the password length is.
  • The same password hashed with the same parameters will always produce the same output.
  • The same password hashed with different salts will produce different outputs.
  • The function deriving a key from a password and salt is CPU intensive and intentionally requires a fair amount of memory. Therefore, it mitigates brute-force attacks by requiring a significant effort to verify each password.

Common use cases:

  • Password storage, or rather storing what it takes to verify a password without having to store the actual password.
  • Deriving a secret key from a password; for example, for disk encryption.

Sodium’s high-level crypto_pwhash_* API currently leverages the Argon2id function on all platforms. This can change at any point in time, but it is guaranteed that a given version of libsodium can verify all hashes produced by all previous versions from any platform. Applications don’t have to worry about backward compatibility.

%load_ext sql

%config SqlMagic.feedback=False
%config SqlMagic.displaycon=False
%sql postgresql://postgres@/

%%sql 
CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS pgsodium;

[]

crypto_pwhash_saltgen() 

salt = %sql select pgsodium.crypto_pwhash_saltgen()
salt = salt[0][0].tobytes()
print(salt)

b'@\xb0\x86\x1c\xcb9\xf0\x03\xfb\x91xt\r\xad\xffG'

crypto_pwhash(password bytea, salt bytea) 

hash = %sql select pgsodium.crypto_pwhash('Correct Horse Battery Staple', :salt)
hash = hash[0][0].tobytes()
print(hash)

b'!\xd6\x11\xab\xdey\xdc\x93.\xb1a7\xd8\xf1Q\xc7\xc4f\xc0\xc0\xa0\x96\xbe<(\xa3(\x87\x1a\x11(='

crypto_pwhash_str(password bytea) 

hash = %sql select pgsodium.crypto_pwhash_str('Correct Horse Battery Staple')::text
hash = hash[0][0]
print(hash)

\x246172676f6e32696424763d3139246d3d3236323134342c743d332c703d312437654669655843796f6f736e734736626c42514856672437726a6f6c6c757058596643557838464f494948745651434268643644486d6738707a446f767934493638000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

crypto_pwhash_str_verify(hash bytea, password bytea) 

result = %sql select pgsodium.crypto_pwhash_str_verify((:hash)::bytea, 'Correct Horse Battery Staple')
print(result)

+--------------------------+
| crypto_pwhash_str_verify |
+--------------------------+
|           True           |
+--------------------------+