A database administrator needs to ensure all passwords are stored in a secure manner, so the administrator adds randomly generated data to each password before storing.
Which of the following techniques BEST explains this action?
A.
Predictability B.
Key stretching C.
Salting D.
Hashing.
C.
A database administrator needs to ensure all passwords are stored in a secure manner, so the administrator adds randomly generated data to each password before storing.
Which of the following techniques BEST explains this action?
A.
Predictability
B.
Key stretching
C.
Salting
D.
Hashing.
C.
The database administrator's action of adding randomly generated data to each password before storing them is an example of salting. Salting is a technique used to increase the complexity and security of stored passwords.
When a password is salted, a random sequence of characters is added to the password before it is hashed and stored. This sequence of characters is unique to each user and is stored alongside the hashed password in the database.
Salting is effective in preventing attackers from using precomputed password hash tables or rainbow tables to crack passwords. Since each password has a unique salt, attackers must compute a new table for each salted password.
Therefore, by using salting, the database administrator ensures that even if an attacker manages to obtain the hashed passwords from the database, it would be difficult for them to reverse-engineer the original passwords.