Update (2017)

This post is over 5 years old. Django now uses PBKDF2 by default and has pluggable password hashing. See how Django stores passwords for detail.

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Revision 16453 of Django improved the security of the password algorithm for the first time since the 0.90 days of years ago. This is a brief discussion on that and Django password schemes in general.

Worth its salt

Most people know that “good” passwords are at least 8 characters and contain an uppercase, lowercase, and number at least. Let’s ignore special characters for now. This yields about 47 bits of entropy. The entire set of 8 character passwords could be reversed in about 36 hours assuming ~1B hashes per second. You could just burn your new rainbow table to a DVD and break everyone’s password. Easy as pie.

Unfortunately for password crackers, this hasn’t worked for years because of salted passwords. Django uses a system of salted passwords where when a user types in their password, the user’s random salt gets prepended to the password before being compared with the salted and hashed password which is stored in the database. It works like this:

Each user gets a different random salt and this way a leaked password database cannot be easily reversed using a rainbow table. Django switched from using a 5 character salt composed of [a-f0-9] (20 bits of entropy) to a 12 character salt made up of [a-zA-Z0-9] (over 71 bits). Formerly, the salt was simply made of the first 5 characters of a sha1 hash of a call to random.random() for about a million unique possible salts. Breaking an old password database was about a million times harder than unsalted passwords which made it prohibitive but not impossible. The new system is considerably more complex.

Remaining weaknesses

If your database leaked, salted passwords will protect the entire set of hashes from being reversed. However, it will not protect a specific hash from being reversed since the salt is stored in the clear. You do not need to reverse every hash to do some damage. You can just reverse the administrator user’s password. If you look what gets stored in Django’s User table, it looks like this:

The password field stores the method of hashing (sha1), the salt and the hashed password separated by ‘$’. Given the user’s salt, we could easily check all 8 character passwords for that salt in the same 36 hours. This doesn’t change if the salt is 5 or 12 characters. Because sha1 is designed to be “fast” since it is also used for things like checksums, it doesn’t really offer much protection here. A better solution is to use a “slow” hashing algorithm that is designed specifically for password hashing like bcrypt or PBKDF2.

More generally

There have been numerous tickets (#5787, #5600, #15367) and proposals and even a project that duckpunches Django to add bcrypt. Parts of these proposals — namely using a system source of randomness where available and a longer salt — have already been implemented as part of changeset 16453. A long term solution is to make the encryption pluggable similar to the way database backends are pluggable. This makes it easy to swap out a particular encryption algorithm if weaknesses are discovered and let different installations have different algorithms based on different requirements.