Of course, if the bad guys get at your DB, then they get the hashes and the asscoiated salts, so its value deteriorates.

Value of salt is that it prevents attacker from creating rainbow tables, if disclosure of salt compromises security of your system it is poorly designed, that's exactly the reason why cleartext passwords are bad. Additional problem with common secret salt is that you can't change it once it leaked.

the more layers there are, the harder it is for them to crack through them all

The harder for you to analyse and verify your security model, the more lines of code, the more bugs.

In reply to Re^2: SaltedDigest Salt? by zwon
in thread SaltedDigest Salt? by packetstormer

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