Password breaches have become a regular occurrence. See: Yahoo (twice), LinkedIn, Adobe, Ashley Madison, and a whole lot more.
Furthermore, with the exception of Yahoo who eventually migrated to bcrypt in 2013, the above examples doubles as a list of “how NOT to do password storage”: simple hashing, unsalted values, misuse of encryption, and failed password migration. (For more information on why these are bad, see our introduction to password hashing theory).
There are two possible interpretations here: first, companies do not put adequate resources in securing passwords; and secondly, getting password hashing right is hard. Furthermore, even if you have followed previous best practice, keeping it right is another technical challenge: algorithm choices, security levels, parameter selection change regularly.
This library aims to be an all-in-one solution for password storage. In particular, we aim to provide:
libpasta is ready to work at a production level straight out of the box. We
hide any unnecessary decisions from the developer. Together with the support for
migrating passwords, libpasta provides a
streamlined, easy, and secure password management solution.
Currently, the algorithm favoured by libpasta is scrypt.
For more details, see algorithm choice.
Many developers still use insecure password hashing systems, despite it causing
embarrassing and significant vulnerabilities should a leak occur.
Our aim is to help everyone adopt modern algorithms and
associated best practices. Hence we have designed libpasta with
built-in support for easy password migration.
This allows you to migrate an existing password hash database to secure algorithms, without inconveniencing users with password resets. Furthermore, having convenient migration tools makes it easier to keep you up-to-date with what hashing parameters should be as computer performance increases.
See basic usage for an example of migrating passwords, or advanced usage for more details.
Password hashing is relatively slow by design,
and setting parameters (the cost of computing the hash) too low can be a
vulnerability. Of course this has to be balanced against performance of your
libpasta-using application.
For times when the default parameters are not sufficient, libpasta helps
developers pick good parameters.
The tuning tool measures the performance of your system to suggest parameters, as well as doing some sanity checks based on the specifications of the system. The tool will help you avoid setting parameters too aggressively
See tuning for more details.
While the main library is written in Rust, thanks to the C-style ABI that is exported by Rust libraries, we are able to support many different languages. Similarly, Rust supports compilation over a number of platforms.
For more information, see other languages.