Password Salting:

Password salting is a security practice that involves adding a unique, random value (known as a “salt”) to each password before hashing it. This salt value is stored along with the hashed password in the database. When a user logs in, the system retrieves the salt, appends it to the entered password, and hashes the combination to verify against the stored hash.

Why It Is Safer:

1. Prevents Hash Collisions:
   • Adding a unique salt ensures that even identical passwords result in different hashes, preventing attackers from identifying common passwords across multiple accounts.
2. Mitigates Precomputed Attacks:
   • Salting effectively thwarts precomputed attacks such as rainbow table attacks, where attackers use precompiled lists of hash values for common passwords. Since each salt is unique, attackers cannot use these tables effectively.
3. Increases Brute Force Complexity:
   • With unique salts, attackers must brute-force each password individually rather than using a single effort for multiple accounts, significantly increasing the time and computational resources required for a successful attack.
4. Reduces Impact of Data Breaches:
   • Even if an attacker gains access to the hashed passwords and their corresponding salts, the complexity added by the salts makes it much harder to reverse-engineer the original passwords.