To prevent pre-computation, hashing schemes now use a trick called "salting," adding random data to a password before hashing it and then storing that "salt" value along with the hash. The security world has responded with its own tricks to slow, if not altogether stop, password hash-cracking.
Instead, when you enter your password on a website, it simply performs the same hash again and checks the results against the hash it created of your password when you chose it, verifying the password's validity without having to store the sensitive password itself. But instead of allowing someone to decrypt that data with a specific key, as typical encryption functions do, hashes aren't designed to be decrypted. Like other forms of encryption, it turns readable data into a scrambled cipher. But just what sort of hashing those passwords have undergone can mean the difference between the thieves ending up with scrambled text that takes years to decipher or successfully “cracking” those hashes in days or hours to convert them back to usable passwords, ready to access your sensitive accounts.Ī hash is designed to act as a "one-way function": A mathematical operation that's easy to perform, but very difficult to reverse.
Instead, the cache of passwords is often converted into a collection of cryptographic hashes, random-looking strings of characters into which the passwords have been mathematically transformed to prevent them from being misused. When hackers compromise a company to access its collection of users’ passwords, what they find and steal isn’t stored in a form that’s readable by humans-at least if the company has even a pretense of security. Some hashing schemes are more easily cracked than others. Hashing is the act of converting passwords into unreadable strings of characters that are designed to be impossible to convert back, known as hashes.
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