A search for “Hash Hunters” turns up marijuana-themed t-shirts for sale. It also brings up a password-cracking outsourcing service, payable in bitcoin. Fearing data breaches, Web services often store ...

Separate password breaches last week at LinkedIn, eHarmony and Last.fm exposed millions of credentials, and once again raised the question of whether any company can get password security right. To ...

Hashing is a one-way cryptographic function while encryption is designed to work both ways. Encryption algorithms take input and a secret key and generate a random looking output called a ciphertext.

In the password security arms race, the bad guys are winning. Once-sturdy cryptographic “hashing” algorithms — pillars of online data security — are proving vulnerable to brute force attacks that use ...