How deeply does Spring Security in Action, Second Edition cover cryptographic salt?

Defines the security role and shows Spring Security generators, but stops short of implementing a complete hashing workflow.

Cryptographic salt

As explained in Spring Security in Action, Second Edition

A salt is additional key-like data combined with an input before a hashing or cryptographic operation to make repeated inputs produce distinct results.

A salt is a random value added to an input before hashing or encryption. It makes the operation stronger by increasing the difficulty of reversing the result. section 4.1.4

Spring Security provides key generators for producing salt values:

StringKeyGenerator returns a salt as a string, typically encoded from an 8-byte key as hexadecimal. section 4.2.1
BytesKeyGenerator returns raw bytes and reports the generated key length; secureRandom() uses 8 bytes by default. section 4.2.1
secureRandom(16) requests 16-byte keys, while shared(16) returns the same key for repeated calls from one generator. section 4.2.1

Generating a string salt

Create a StringKeyGenerator with KeyGenerators.string(), then call generateKey() to obtain the salt.

How Spring Security in Action, Second Edition covers it

Cover of Spring Security in Action, Second Edition

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Also explained in

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Hacking CryptographyA salt is a publicly known value combined with a password before hashing to make precomputed password-hash tables less reusable.
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Grokking Relational Database DesignA cryptographic salt is a random value combined with password input before hashing to make precomputed hash attacks less effective.
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Grokking Web Application SecurityA salt is a random value added to input data before hashing so that identical inputs produce different hash values.
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Just Use Postgres!A cryptographic salt is a random value combined with a password before hashing to make identical passwords produce different hashes and to limit compromise scope.

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Related concepts

saltingused by · Salting is the practice of combining data, especially a password, with an additional value before hashing to produce distinct hashes and hinder precomputed attacks.
gen_saltproduced by · gen_salt is a pgcrypto function that generates a random salt for password hashing using a specified algorithm.
password hashinguses · Password hashing is the use of a one-way, deliberately costly function to derive values for securely storing and verifying passwords without retaining the original passwords.
dictionary attackcontrasts with · A dictionary attack is a credential-guessing technique that tests candidate passwords or values drawn from a prepared list of common or likely choices.
rainbow tableaddresses · A rainbow table is a precomputed structure of chained password-hash values that accelerates recovery of plaintext passwords from unsalted hashes by trading storage for lookup time.

This explainer was generated by Manning's knowledge graph from the text of Spring Security in Action, Second Edition. The section links point to the parts of the book it draws on.