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Global Accelerated Learning • Est. 1999
Glossary Term Salting

Training Camp • Cybersecurity Glossary

What is Salting?

Salting adds a unique random value to each password before hashing, defeating rainbow tables and strengthening secure password storage.

Glossary > Cryptography & PKI > Salting

Understanding Salting

Salting is the practice of adding a unique, random value called a salt to each password before it is hashed and stored, ensuring identical passwords produce different hash outputs. This defeats precomputed attacks such as rainbow tables and forces an attacker to crack each hash individually, and it is a foundational element of secure password storage when combined with a slow, adaptive hashing algorithm like bcrypt, scrypt, or Argon2.

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