What is salting in hashing and why is it important?

What is salting in hashing and why is it important?

Salting is the process of adding a random value to passwords before hashing them. This enhances security by ensuring that even if two users have the same password, their hashed values will be different.

How does salting protect against rainbow table attacks?

Salting makes rainbow tables ineffective because the attacker would need a unique rainbow table for each salt value, which is impractical.

Is there a standard length for salts?

While there isn't a strict standard, a common practice is to use salts that are at least 16 bytes long to ensure sufficient randomness.

Can you give an example of how to implement salting?

Sure! When a user creates a password, generate a random salt, append it to the password, and then hash the combined value. Store both the salt and the hash.