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Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » PwdHash: Open Source Web Password Hashing

July 26, 2005 | Comments: (0)

PwdHash: Open Source Web Password Hashing

I might be late to the game on this...open source web password hashing algorithm from Stanford.

PwdHash is an browser extension that transparently converts a user's password into a domain-specific password. The user can activate this hashing by choosing passwords that start with a special prefix (@@) or by pressing a special password key (F2). PwdHash automatically replaces the contents of these password fields with a one-way hash of the pair (password, domain-name). As a result, the site only sees a domain-specific hash of the password, as opposed to the password itself. A break-in at a low security site exposes password hashes rather than an actual password. We emphasize that the hash function we use is public and can be computed on any machine which enables users to login to their web accounts from any machine in the world. Hashing is done using a Pseudo Random Function (PRF).

Posted by Dave Rosenberg on July 26, 2005 09:28 AM


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