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Hashing passwords to protect against brute force attacks [duplicate]

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I need to store a hash of a single password in a .Net WinForms application.
What's the most secure way to do this?
In particular:
Salt, HMAC, or both?
How much salt?
How many iterations?
What encoding? (The password is plain ASCII)
I assume that the algorithm should be either SHA512 or HMACSHA512.

Salt your hash with secure random salt of at least 128bits or longer, to avoid a rainbow attack and use BCrypt, PBKDF2 or scrypt. PBKDF2 comes with NIST approval.
To quote: Archive.org: http://chargen.matasano.com/chargen/2007/9/7/enough-with-the-rainbow-tables-what-you-need-to-know-about-s.html
The problem is that MD5 is fast. So are its modern competitors, like
SHA1 and SHA256. Speed is a design
goal of a modern secure hash, because
hashes are a building block of almost
every cryptosystem, and usually get
demand-executed on a per-packet or
per-message basis.
Speed is exactly what you don’t want in a password hash function.
Fast password validation functions are a problem, cause they can be attacked using brute force. With all the algorithms above you can control the "slowness"

I can recommend BCrypt.net. Very easy to use and you can tune how long it will take to do the hashing, which is awesome!
// Pass a logRounds parameter to GenerateSalt to explicitly specify the
// amount of resources required to check the password. The work factor
// increases exponentially, so each increment is twice as much work. If
// omitted, a default of 10 is used.
string hashed = BCrypt.HashPassword(password, BCrypt.GenerateSalt(12));
// Check the password.
bool matches = BCrypt.CheckPassword(candidate, hashed);

For a server-side implementation with a large number of passwords, you should definitely use a tunable iterated approach like bcrypt. This well-known article on the topic is still (mostly) relevant:
http://www.securityfocus.com/blogs/262
For a single password in a stand-alone application, where the storage location is probably already secured by the system's own authentication system, I think it's much less important. A single strong hash is likely good enough, and adding salt is easy enough that there's no reason not to do so.

RNGCryptoServiceProvider to generate a random salt, then SHA512 the password with the salt, and finally store both the password hash and the corresponding salt if you want to later verify that some text equals the stored password.

Hash and Salt. If you only hash you could be attacked by a rainbow attack (reverse has lookup) and a salt makes this much more difficult (random salt would be best.) For your encoding you will probably want to either Base64 or Hex encode your resulting byte array. If you just try to store the byte array as Unicode you could run the risk of some data being lost because not all patterns are valid characters. This also allows for an easier way to compare hashes (just compare the base64 or hex string when you want to validate instead of comparing the byte array)
An increased number of rounds doesn't do much beyond slowing down would be attackers. But is also makes is much more difficult to reuse the hashes in the future if you lose or need to recreate your hash algorithm. You might check out a standard password hash such as crypt on unix systems. This allows for you to change out the hash algorithm and can even support versioning.
But again, a simple hash + salt is good enough for most applications.

Strictly looking at more secure:
Salt, HMAC, or both?
Both would be more secure. Since the key to the HMAC could be considered a salt, doing both would be a little redundant, but still more secure because it would take more work to crack.
How much salt?
Every bit of salt would double the combinations that would need to be maintained in a rainbow-table to easily crack the password. But since there is only one password, and only one salt, more may not be needed. The HMAC uses the block size of the underlying hash for its key size, 1024 bits for SHA512. The block size should be good enough for the salt, but doubling or tripling it would make cracking the password with a rainbow-table much, much harder.
How many iterations?
The more the better. Sure, more iterations means it will take longer to determine if the correct password was entered, but computers are fast and users will not mind waiting for a few seconds while verifying the password. Doing more iterations would mean that someone cracking the password would have to do more iterations too.
What encoding? (The password is plain ASCII)
Might as well encrypt (with AES) the over-iterated, over-salted, HMAC'ed, super-secure password along with its salt just to make it harder. Make the password for the encrypted password hash and key, be some combination of strings that should appear in the executable such as "RNGCryptoServiceProvider" or "System.Security.Cryptography". And while encoding we might as well convert it hex, or base64, or better yet base-36 or some other less expected conversion.
Note: This was mostly written in jest, but should still contain some truth.

I think you should stick with open standards. Among the current hash schemes, the "{ssha}" used by OpenLDAP is very secure and widely used. You can find the description here,
http://www.openldap.org/faq/data/cache/347.html
Most LDAP libraries implement this scheme.

You could follow a published standard, like pkcs#5. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKCS for a short description, or https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2898 for the RFC.

Here is an API which will do everything you need/want :)
https://sourceforge.net/projects/pwdtknet

Why this cCryptoGS AES encryption gives out all ciphertext pretty much the same?

I'm currently experimenting AES encryption using Google App Script, and I found out about cCryptoGS.
It feels weird, as like all ciphered texts seem to start with U2FsdGVkX1 (even though I change the part this is my passphrase in the example to something else very very different). I am not sure if I remembered correctly, I once tried AES in the past, but on Nodejs, and it looked just so much different, I'll get completely different text ciphered out even if I change only a single character in either my message, or my key.
Even in this post How is AES implemented in CryptoJS?, the ciphered text also starts with U2FsdGVkX1.
What I am asking is this: Is this cCryptoGS actually do what it claims to do? (i.e to apply AES encryption to a message)
Here's the website https://ramblings.mcpher.com/gassnippets2/cryptojs-libraries-for-google-apps-script/ There are also graphs on the site to show that Google App Script cannot handle complicated calculations well, so it looks legit, but the result seems to be so... weird... Since, overall AES seemed to be one of the best option to do encryption.
If this is indeed how AES should work, is there any way that I can make it seems more random? Thank you so much in advance, :(
Thank you very much in advance,

CryptoJS can process both passphrases and keys for encryption and decryption. Strings are interpreted as passphrases, WordArrays as keys, s. The Cipher Input.
cCryptoGS wraps the passphrase variant and supports the algorithms AES, DES, TripleDES and Rabbit, see Usage.
E.g. for AES, cCryptoGS/CryptoJS encrypts with AES-256, whereby a passphrase must be passed in addition to the plaintext.
Before encryption a random 8 bytes salt is generated and from passphrase and salt a 32 bytes key and 16 bytes IV is derived with the OpenSSL key derivation function EVP_BytesToKey().
The result is generated in OpenSSL format for compatibility with OpenSSL, which consists of the ASCII encoding of Salted__ followed by the 8 bytes salt and the actual ciphertext, with the entire expression Base64 encoded.
The Base64 encoding of Salted__ is U2FsdGVkX18=, where U2FsdGVkX1 is fixed (the last two characters depend on the 1st byte of the salt and can therefore change). Thus, any encryption starts with U2FsdGVkX1, but this does not reveal any information.
So yes, it is encrypted with AES-256, and the constant prefix U2FsdGVkX1 is not critical.
However, the key derivation function EVP_BytesToKey() is deemed insecure nowadays, especially with the parameters used by cCryptoGS/CryptoJS (broken MD5 digest and an iteration count of 1), s. e.g. here, 3rd part, so its use cannot actually be recommended (apart for compatibility maybe).
This applies to the wrapped functionalities that use passphrases for encryption/decryption. cCryptoGS also directly allows the use of CryptoJS functions, see CryptoJS direct, whose security is to be assessed individually.
The secure way is to pass key and IV directly, or when using a passphrase not to apply the built-in function EVP_BytesToKey(), but a reliable key derivation function like PBKDF2.
These variants are supported by CryptoJS, but apparently not by cCryptoGS, at least not by the wrapped functionalities.
Also note that at least the linked cCryptoGS sources seem to be based on CryptoJS version 3.1.2 which is from 2013, s. cCryptoGS sources (current CryptoJS version is 4.1.1).

understanding different encrypt mode in cryptojs

I am learning about various hashing technique and found interesting library to start with cryptoJs
In the documentation, there are multiple options defined as below
hashing
HMAC
PBKDF2
Ciphers
Encoders
I understanding hashing is about generating the ciphertext. HMAC is about generating message authenticate code. But I am struggling to differentiate between PBKDF2, Ciphers, and Encoders. Which one to choose when?
Any pointers are helpful.

Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2 - PBKDF2 are functions used to create cryptographic keys that are harder to brute force using key-stretching. because humans are lazy and create passwords way too easy to brute force.
For example: our favorite password is "password"
Given a salt of "5C52FBAE9A4D97A49D14C8AF338DA55C"
The cryptographic key becomes
(Hex)A2EB261802FFD1965D034AC252E880A44955078D6D4F12EDCDF6D03549F0
(B64)ousmGAL/0ZZdA0rCUuiApElVB41tTxLtzfbQNUnw
try it here
It becomes apparent that the hash is not as easy to break as "password" on its own.
Nevertheless still possible with pre-computed hashes. You can see more here.
Ciphers on the other hand constitutes of methods for performing encryption as well as decryption. Some ciphers you see in cryptoJs are your basic AES, DES, triple DES etc.
Encoders are simply used for Encoding where encoding is very general. It is largely used to transform data so that another system can understand it. In the technology field, this is largely because every system architecture and technology has their own interpretations. Different applications will understand different encoding as per their need.
In Summary,
Encryption and Encoding are are designed 2 ways whereas PBKDF2 is a method of generating cryptographic keys (hashes) which are designed one way. Encoders are used to encode data into a form that can be transmitted or interpreted by another system.
Putting it in context:
If we want to store the password in a database we hash it because we do not need to know what the password is (no reversal required). However when we sent an encrypted mail to a friend we want to be able to reverse that encryption (decryption). Otherwise the content is lost. When the mail is sent, we added an attachment. The attachment is encoded in a way that other email clients can decode otherwise the other system cannot open up the attachment or will wrongly interpret the data sent.
So Encoding and Encrypting are similar in that encoded text and encrypted text can both be reversed. However, encoded text are meant to be reversed by anyone or any system that gets its hand on the encoded text since the encoding schemes are publicly available but encrypted text such as ciphertext are meant to be reversed only by certain specified individuals i.e. people who possess the key or decryption algorithms. In our example above, we want our attachment to be interpreted by any system but we do not want the content of the email including the attachment to be opened by everyone.

PBKDF2 is used when you want to hash a password but with the usual hashing functions, your password is vulnerable to dictionary attacks. So here comes PBKDF2 and salt.
Ciphers: Those are your normal encrypting functions. If you want to send some encrypted message where only the one with the right key can decrypt it.
Encoders: Are for text encoding formats.

How bcryptjs or bcrypt verifies password hash generated with random salt? [duplicate]

Coda Hale's article "How To Safely Store a Password" claims that:
bcrypt has salts built-in to prevent rainbow table attacks.
He cites this paper, which says that in OpenBSD's implementation of bcrypt:
OpenBSD generates the 128-bit bcrypt salt from an arcfour
(arc4random(3)) key stream, seeded with random data the kernel
collects from device timings.
I don't understand how this can work. In my conception of a salt:
It needs to be different for each stored password, so that a separate rainbow table would have to be generated for each
It needs to be stored somewhere so that it's repeatable: when a user tries to log in, we take their password attempt, repeat the same salt-and-hash procedure we did when we originally stored their password, and compare
When I'm using Devise (a Rails login manager) with bcrypt, there is no salt column in the database, so I'm confused. If the salt is random and not stored anywhere, how can we reliably repeat the hashing process?
In short, how can bcrypt have built-in salts?

This is bcrypt:
Generate a random salt. A "cost" factor has been pre-configured. Collect a password.
Derive an encryption key from the password using the salt and cost factor. Use it to encrypt a well-known string. Store the cost, salt, and cipher text. Because these three elements have a known length, it's easy to concatenate them and store them in a single field, yet be able to split them apart later.
When someone tries to authenticate, retrieve the stored cost and salt. Derive a key from the input password, cost and salt. Encrypt the same well-known string. If the generated cipher text matches the stored cipher text, the password is a match.
Bcrypt operates in a very similar manner to more traditional schemes based on algorithms like PBKDF2. The main difference is its use of a derived key to encrypt known plain text; other schemes (reasonably) assume the key derivation function is irreversible, and store the derived key directly.
Stored in the database, a bcrypt "hash" might look something like this:
$2a$10$vI8aWBnW3fID.ZQ4/zo1G.q1lRps.9cGLcZEiGDMVr5yUP1KUOYTa
This is actually three fields, delimited by "$":
2a identifies the bcrypt algorithm version that was used.
10 is the cost factor; 210 iterations of the key derivation function are used (which is not enough, by the way. I'd recommend a cost of 12 or more.)
vI8aWBnW3fID.ZQ4/zo1G.q1lRps.9cGLcZEiGDMVr5yUP1KUOYTa is the salt and the cipher text, concatenated and encoded in a modified Base-64. The first 22 characters decode to a 16-byte value for the salt. The remaining characters are cipher text to be compared for authentication.
This example is taken from the documentation for Coda Hale's ruby implementation.

I believe that phrase should have been worded as follows:
bcrypt has salts built into the generated hashes to prevent rainbow table attacks.
The bcrypt utility itself does not appear to maintain a list of salts. Rather, salts are generated randomly and appended to the output of the function so that they are remembered later on (according to the Java implementation of bcrypt). Put another way, the "hash" generated by bcrypt is not just the hash. Rather, it is the hash and the salt concatenated.

This is a simple terms...
Bcrypt does not have a database it stores the salt...
The salt is added to the hash in base64 format....
The question is how does bcrypt verifies the password when it has no database...?
What bcrypt does is that it extract the salt from the password hash... Use the salt extracted to encrypt the plain password and compares the new hash with the old hash to see if they are the same...

To make things even more clearer,
Registeration/Login direction ->
The password + salt is encrypted with a key generated from the: cost, salt and the password. we call that encrypted value the cipher text. then we attach the salt to this value and encoding it using base64. attaching the cost to it and this is the produced string from bcrypt:
$2a$COST$BASE64
This value is stored eventually.
What the attacker would need to do in order to find the password ? (other direction <- )
In case the attacker got control over the DB, the attacker will decode easily the base64 value, and then he will be able to see the salt. the salt is not secret. though it is random.
Then he will need to decrypt the cipher text.
What is more important : There is no hashing in this process, rather CPU expensive encryption - decryption. thus rainbow tables are less relevant here.

Lets imagine a table that has 1 hashed password. If hacker gets access he would know the salt but he will have to calculate a big list for all the common passwords and compare after each calculation. This will take time and he would have only cracked 1 password.
Imagine a second hashed password in the same table. The salt is visible but the same above calculation needs to happen again to crack this one too because the salts are different.
If no random salts were used, it would have been much easier, why? If we use simple hashing we can just generate hashes for common passwords 1 single time (rainbow table) and just do a simple table search, or simple file search between the db table hashes and our pre-calculated hashes to find the plain passwords.

Cordova password encryption

I have done some research on encryption and learnt how it works and what it consists of but I'm yet to fully understand how to implement password encryption.
I'm trying to encrypt my passwords that are being sent to my database, how can I achieve this?
Thanks to the information you guys provided I have had a look at hash tables, am I correct in assuming a hash table basically converts a value to a different value for example:
var HashTable = { one: [1,10,5], two: [2], three: [3, 30, 300] }
and then passes the new value to the database?

Do not encrypt passwords, when the attacker gets the DB he will also get the encryption key.
Just using a hash function is not sufficient and just adding a salt does little to improve the security. Instead iIterate over an HMAC with a random salt for about a 100ms duration and save the salt with the hash. Use a function such as PBKDF2, Rfc2898DeriveBytes, password_hash, Bcrypt or similar functions. The point is to make the attacker spend a lot of time finding passwords by brute force.
Cryptographic hash functions are substantially more sophisticated than the example in the question, their output can not be distinguished from random bits/bytes, a one bit change on the input essentially causes 50% or the output bits to change and they are not reversible.