Thanks. I thought I saw an article about a recent leak with salted bcrypted passwords where they cracked weak passwords. The conclusion was there is no way to prevent a weak password from being compromised so to prevent it require longer more complicated passwords.
The author of this piece was doing about 156 hashes per second and after just over five days, he had only gone through and cracked 4,000 account passwords--we're talking 0.0001% of Ashley Madison's supposed userbase here. To run just over the 14,000,000 passwords from RockYou.txt on every single user account from AM, it would take up to at least two billion years.
Weak passwords are still weak, but things like bcrypt buy you time. A bcrypt configuration might have hashing take 250ms on a server's Xeon CPU (as opposed to nanoseconds with a sha-based hash). You can try the password 'password' on say 50k hashes that were dumped, but it will take about 3.5 hours. You can get this time down by parallelizing or with better hardware like GPUs / FPGAs / ASICs, but you're still looking at a base time of 3.5 hours per attempt to go through each account. Or if you're only targeting one account, 3.5 hours to try 50k words.
If the server had bcrypt configured to take a second per password, multiple everything by 4. And so on. What I think is needed as a supplement to "use bcrypt / scrypt" is a "and use it this way so you don't accidentally open your server to DoSing or give a poor experience", because a 10 seconds-to-compute-on-a-Xeon hash is great from a security standpoint if your hashes get leaked, it sucks from a user experience to have to wait at least 10 seconds to login, and if you have to service multiple logins at once your server's not going to be able to do anything else if you just use bcrypt/scrypt synchronously.
If the server had bcrypt configured to take a second per password, multiple everything by 4. And so on. What I think is needed as a supplement to "use bcrypt / scrypt" is a "and use it this way so you don't accidentally open your server to DoSing or give a poor experience", because a 10 seconds-to-compute-on-a-Xeon hash is great from a security standpoint if your hashes get leaked, it sucks from a user experience to have to wait at least 10 seconds to login, and if you have to service multiple logins at once your server's not going to be able to do anything else if you just use bcrypt/scrypt synchronously.
If you're in a situation where you're needing to rely on hashing a user's password for every action, your application has far worse problems than what password storage method is in play. Moving from your current password storage method that is inadequate to one that would be better also takes into account that you haven't done something completely wrong with session states.
[edit]
I misread the poster I was responding to assuming that they meant that the user was re-authenticating on each request. My thought process was that if they're storing credentials in a cookie in lieu of a session ID then that needed to be addressed first before even going down the avenue of correcting password storage.
