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Global Accelerated Learning • Est. 1999
Glossary Term Salt in Cryptography

Training Camp • Cybersecurity Glossary

What is Salt in Cryptography?

A cryptographic salt is a unique random value added before hashing a password to defeat rainbow tables and force per-hash cracking.

Glossary > Cryptography & PKI > Salt in Cryptography

Understanding Salt in Cryptography

In cryptography, a salt is a unique random value added to a password before it is hashed, ensuring that identical passwords produce different hash outputs. Salting defeats precomputed attacks such as rainbow tables and forces an attacker to crack each hash individually. Salts are stored alongside the hash and are typically used with slow, adaptive password-hashing functions like bcrypt, scrypt, or Argon2.

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