High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In cryptography, a salt comprises random bits that are used as one of the inputs to a key derivation function. The other input is usually a password or passphrase. The output of the key derivation function is stored as the encrypted version of the password. A salt can also be used as a part of a key in a cipher or other cryptographic algorithm. The key derivation function typically uses a cryptographic hash function. Sometimes the initialization vector, a previously-generated value, is used as the salt. Salt data complicates dictionary attacks that use pre-encryption of dictionary entries: each bit of salt used doubles the amount of storage and computation required. For best security, the salt value is kept secret, separate from the password database. This provides an advantage when a database is stolen, but the salt is not. To determine a password from a stolen hash, an attacker cannot simply try common passwords (such as English language words or names). Rather, they must calculate the hashes of random characters (at least for the portion of the input they know is the salt), which is much slower.

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