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Comment on Ask HN: How do you currently solve authentication?parent

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You're absolutely right, but there's one pretty critical point I want to make:

Good TLS and salt + strong hash solve the simple cases of DB theft and network MITM...

It doesn't even solve this that. If you're explicitly salting your password hashes and not using a library, you're probably doing something very wrong. Unless you're hashing your passwords with an expensive key stretching function such as bcrypt or scrypt (or even better, a CPU hard hash like argon2) anyone who get their hands on your database can very cheaply bruteforce about 90% of your passwords (all but the most expensive ones).

A salt will only protect you from rainbow table attacks, and while that's useful, since computing SHA-2 on a GPU is so mind-bogglingly fast today, it just doesn't mean much anymore.

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