Most passwords are hashed or one way encrypted when stored for added security. This makes it difficult for an attacker to retrieve the original password through accidental or malicious access to the database as there is no way to decrypt it directly. Unfortunately this approach is still susceptible to rainbow tables, where you use an already generated table of password combinations and their hashes to quickly look up the original password from the hash. Due to this, most systems have implemented salts to their hashes by either … Continue reading →