Salt question - using a "random salt"

Posted by barfoon on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by barfoon
Published on 2010-06-08T16:19:17Z Indexed on 2010/06/08 16:22 UTC
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security

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encryption

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hashing

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salt

Hey everyone,

Further to my question here, I have another question regarding salts.

When someone says "use a random salt" to pre/append to a password, does this mean:

Creating a static a 1 time randomly generated string of characters, or
Creating a string of characters that changes at random every time a password is created?

If the salt is random for every user and stored along with the hashed password, how is the original salt ever retrieved back for verification?

Thanks!

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