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The question is not whether BCrypt is backed by Blowfish, the question is whether BCrypt uses Blowfish in a way which is cryptographically sound. If it does not, then an attacker may not need to use brute force. Assuming the author has read more of Mr. Schneier's book than the quoted preamble, he should know this -- Schneier discusses this at length in both editions of Applied Cryptography.

Again, an example of this is the 3DES encrypt/decrypt/encrypt process vs. a more naive encrypt/encrypt/encrypt process. One is substantially stronger than the other. One is a secure way to use DES, and one is not.



Don't use DES-EDE.

Schneier all but disavowed _Applied Cryptography_ in _Practical Cryptography_.

Schneier's reputation as a cryptanalyst is, as even he might concede at this point, somewhat outstripping his actual career.

Bcrypt is part of the academic literature; the people who wrote it are both renowned.

You can make your same critique about any other crypto construction; maybe the OCB block cipher mode is unsafe! After all, Bruce Schneier didn't write it!


Bcrypt has been around for ten years. No one has broken it yet. Is this perfect? No. But then again, we don't know that the implementation you would pick for MD5, SHA1, etc are perfect either. You take the best you can get.


You're speculating about the existence of a flaw which is there no evidence to believe could exist. Just because some crypto constructions are not as sound as naive theory suggests does not mean all constructions are flawed, or even capable of being flawed.

bcrypt is not an encryption algorithm. It doesn't "protect" your users' data, so there's no reason to trust or not trust it with their data.


Yes there is. A hash function does protect a user's password.

If you don't believe me, consider this hash function

H(A) = (A>>1)&0xFFFFFFFF

There. Hash function. It sends any input to a 32 bit value. Would you use it for your password though? No. I certainly would not.

Granted, that is an incredibly weak example, but it's one that's easy to see why it's weak, and thus why a hash function does protect a user's data.


ok, that's a fair point. i guess i just believe bcrypt does a better job than that. :)




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