Salting
Adding random data to a password before hashing it, making stolen password hashes far harder to crack.
·1 min read
Salting↗ is the practice of adding a unique piece of random data, a \"salt\", to a password before hashing↗ it, so that even identical passwords produce completely different hash values across different accounts.
Without salting, an attacker who steals a database of password hashes could use precomputed tables to crack many accounts at once. Salting forces the attacker to crack each password individually, which dramatically increases the time and cost of any attack.