Is SHA-1 secure for password storage?
- by Tgr
Some people throw around remarks like "SHA-1 is broken" a lot, so I'm trying to understand what exactly that means. Let's assume I have a database of SHA-1 password hashes, and an attacker whith a state of the art SHA-1 breaking algorithm and a botnet with 100,000 machines gets access to it. (Having control over 100k home computers would mean they can do about 10^15 operations per second.) How much time would they need to
find out the password of any one user?
find out the password of a given user?
find out the password of all users?
find a way to log in as one of the users?
find a way to log in as a specific user?
How does that change if the passwords are salted? Does the method of salting (prefix, postfix, both, or something more complicated like xor-ing) matter?
Here is my current understanding, after some googling. Please correct in the answers if I misunderstood something.
If there is no salt, a rainbow attack will immediately find all passwords (except extremely long ones).
If there is a sufficiently long random salt, the most effective way to find out the passwords is a brute force or dictionary attack. Neither collision nor preimage attacks are any help in finding out the actual password, so cryptographic attacks against SHA-1 are no help here. It doesn't even matter much what algorithm is used - one could even use MD5 or MD4 and the passwords would be just as safe (there is a slight difference because computing a SHA-1 hash is slower).
To evaluate how safe "just as safe" is, let's assume that a single sha1 run takes 1000 operations and passwords contain uppercase, lowercase and digits (that is, 60 characters). That means the attacker can test 1015*60*60*24 / 1000 ~= 1017 potential password a day. For a brute force attack, that would mean testing all passwords up to 9 characters in 3 hours, up to 10 characters in a week, up to 11 characters in a year. (It takes 60 times as much for every additional character.) A dictionary attack is much, much faster (even an attacker with a single computer could pull it off in hours), but only finds weak passwords.
To log in as a user, the attacker does not need to find out the exact password; it is enough to find a string that results in the same hash. This is called a first preimage attack. As far as I could find, there are no preimage attacks against SHA-1. (A bruteforce attack would take 2160 operations, which means our theoretical attacker would need 1030 years to pull it off. Limits of theoretical possibility are around 260 operations, at which the attack would take a few years.) There are preimage attacks against reduced versions of SHA-1 with negligible effect (for the reduced SHA-1 which uses 44 steps instead of 80, attack time is down from 2160 operations to 2157). There are collision attacks against SHA-1 which are well within theoretical possibility (the best I found brings the time down from 280 to 252), but those are useless against password hashes, even without salting.
In short, storing passwords with SHA-1 seems perfectly safe. Did I miss something?
