Engineering in the white spaces
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The final step is to measure the information entropy of specific passwords and their hashes. In this context, entropy is a measure of unpredictability. For randomly-generated passwords, the information entropy (measured in bits) is a reasonable proxy for password strength.
For example, a password with 42 bits of entropy is as strong as a string of 42 bits chosen randomly. An attacker would need 242 attempts to exhaust every possibility of finding this password by brute force. Adding an extra bit of entropy doubles the number of guesses required, making the attacker's task twice as difficult.
Read more08-Apr-2011 21:25
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Generating and verifying password hashes
To create the salted hash, we're going to use the .NET Framework's implementation of a key derivation function called PBKDF2, also published as RFC 2898. PBKDF2 has some useful properties: you can use a salt, you can define the hash output size, and you can configure the slowdown factor by specifying the number of iterations over the hash function. Read more
02-Apr-2011 20:00
