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What is Salting?

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Salting features random data that companies utilise in hashing passwords or data in cryptography. The additional input is practically useful when it comes to protecting storage passwords. It is one of the methods developed as an extra safeguard to ensure systems protect user passwords against unauthorised reading. Each password has a unique salt generated and processed with a cryptographic hash function in a typical setting. In this case, the system stores the output hash value and the salt in a secure database. The hashing function is useful to network and system administrators who want to execute authentication processes without exposing the plaintext passwords.  Salting is found to be particularly useful regarding brute force attacks, which is an automated attempt to find a password by forcing every possible combination of letters, numbers and characters until the target password is found and access to the desired system is achieved.  Essentially salting adds something to the password which complicates the hash and therefore makes it harder to crack as you have hidden its true hash value from the attacker.  It is important to know that using a unique salt for each and every password is a must do, if your salt is known it can just be used in every attempt to find the password making it essentially useless.

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