[Haskell-cafe] Storing passwords securely

[Peter Scott]

On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 10:54 PM, Jeremy Shaw <jeremy at n-heptane.com> wrote:

> Have you seen the PBKDF2 library?
>
> http://hackage.haskell.org/package/PBKDF2
>
> <http://hackage.haskell.org/package/PBKDF2> Does that look like a
> reasonable way to store passwords securely?
>

Yes, I looked at it before I started on pwstore. The code does indeed
calculate the PBKDF2 key derivation function, and the documentation is terse
but descriptive. It's usable, but it's not *trivial* to use. With the PBKDF2
library, a user has to:

1. Understand what PBKDF2 is, at least well enough to know what the
documentation is talking about when it mentions things like "length of prf
output".

2. Convert passwords to and from [Word8], which is not a very common type to
have immediately on hand.

3. Generate unique salts for each user. Easy, but it would be nice if the
library handled this for you.

4. Manage the salt and the hashed password separately. Again easy, but a
small hassle.

5. Store the salt and hashed password as byte vectors. Some storage methods
may have trouble with data that may contain (for example) the '\NUL'
character. This is why my library uses base64 encoding.

Some more problems are that the library is slow (thanks to the unoptimized
hash functions in Crypto) and the documentation is not as clear as it could
be about what a newbie needs to do. Also, if you want to extend a bunch of
existing hashed passwords with more iterations as hardware gets faster,
there's no obvious easy way to do that with PBKDF2.

In other words, while the PBKDF2 library is technically correct, it's not as
slick and easy-to-use as a password storage library should be, and *must*
be, if we want everyone to store passwords properly. One of the aphorisms of
cryptography is "don't roll your own", but as long as the existing code
feels like it's not quite what the users are looking for, there will still
be the temptation to ignore this advice and roll your own anyway. I want to
make something that people can use in ten minutes and say "there, I'm done."

-Peter
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