And he can also try this password on Hulu and HBO Go to see if you used the same email address and password for those accounts as well. Now, this hacker can log in to your Netflix account and binge watch all four seasons of Fuller House (“how rude!”). This will reveal nearly instantly what your plain text password is for Netflix. Even a mediocre hacker now only needs to lookup the SHA2 hash associated with your Netflix account to see if it exists in their lookup table. If Netflix is breached, their user database is likely now available to anyone with a good internet connection and a torrent client. For example, let’s assume for a moment that Netflix stores your password using an SHA2 hash. Using a lookup table, all the attacker needs to know is the SHA2 hash of the password and they can see if it exists in the table. The table is built by simply hashing every possible password combination and storing it in some type of database or data-structure that allows for quick lookups. This method builds a massive lookup table that maps hashes to plain text passwords. The first is called a lookup table, or sometimes referred to as a rainbow table. Next, we’ll outline the two most common approaches of reversing a hash. While one-way hashing means we aren’t storing plain text passwords, it is still possible to determine the original plain text password from a hash. When a user is authenticated, the plain text password they type into the login form is hashed, and because the algorithm will always produce the same hash result given the same input, comparing this hash to the hash in the database tells us the password is correct. Developers use an SHA2 hash so that instead of storing a plain text password, they instead only store the hash. The algorithm was designed specifically so that going from a hash back to the original bytes is infeasible. For example, the SHA-256 algorithm produces a 256 bit result. SHA2 is a hashing algorithm that uses various bit-wise operations on any number of bytes to produce a fixed sized hash. HashingĪ hash by definition is a function that can map data of an arbitrary size to data of a fixed size. Let’s take a look at one-way hashing algorithms and how computers handle them. One-way hashing is better (we’ll get to why in a second), but it is only as secure as is mathematically feasible. Many of these databases of identities include passwords in plain text, while others are one-way hashed. Here’s the reality, billions of credentials have been leaked or stolen and are now easily downloaded online by anyone. Security The Math of Password Hashing Algorithms And Entropy
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