Seeing the salt of a 3DES or MD5 encrypted password hash isn't enough to make it nearly as easy to read as plaintext. The sniffer would know the encrypted password that one time, but they'd still have to actually crack it in order to use it in the future, or sniff the newly encrypted one next time too, and beat you to submitting the data back to the server. You could also make sure the server only accepts the password encrypted with that salt from the IP to which it sent that salt...
In other words, don't dismiss advice out of hand without considering that it might actually be good advice. | [reply] |
Playing tricks like that will only get crackers excited. You don't want to excite the crackers. Better to just stick it on an SSL server and hope for the best!
-sam
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