> Stop associating “hashed” with “secure” when it comes to passwords. If you’re storing user credentials MD5-ed without salt, you’ve put an thumb tack in front of a steamroller - just a minor annoyance that won’t offer you any real security. You have to do it right or hashing means nothing.
> Start relying on key derivation functions for password storage.[1] Are they perfect? Will they be the best practice in five years? Probably not, but they’re your best option when rolling your own user credential storage.
> Don’t sacrifice security for performance. A slightly slower malloc in OpenSSL would have been much preferred, in my opinion, than the disaster that is Heartbleed.
- [1] There’s a fair bit of dispute over the ideal KDF for storing passwords, but generally speaking, any of the three covered in this topic are popularly accepted options.
Re: slower malloc, there is no actual proof of, say, modern glibc's malloc implementation is slower in any useful measurement of the term. Heartbleed, however, didn't happen because someone failed benchmarking 101, it happened because someone failed bounds checking 101.
The point that I and others want to make, is that regardless of the ultimate cause of failure, we want to criticize the whole design approach. Security in layers needs conservative coding style, both safe and sound internal APIs, bounds checking and an overly cautious memory allocator.
It's not just about finding and fixing bugs, but how to improve the whole process.
> Stop associating “hashed” with “secure” when it comes to passwords. If you’re storing user credentials MD5-ed without salt, you’ve put an thumb tack in front of a steamroller - just a minor annoyance that won’t offer you any real security. You have to do it right or hashing means nothing.
> Start relying on key derivation functions for password storage.[1] Are they perfect? Will they be the best practice in five years? Probably not, but they’re your best option when rolling your own user credential storage.
> Don’t sacrifice security for performance. A slightly slower malloc in OpenSSL would have been much preferred, in my opinion, than the disaster that is Heartbleed.
- [1] There’s a fair bit of dispute over the ideal KDF for storing passwords, but generally speaking, any of the three covered in this topic are popularly accepted options.