Hash and salt passwords in C#

Question

I was just going through one of DavidHayden\'s articles on Hashing User Passwords.

Really I can\'t get what he is trying to achieve.

Here is his code:

<

Answer 1

I read all answers and I think those enough, specially @Michael articles with slow hashing and @CodesInChaos good comments, but I decided to share my code snippet for hashing/validating that may be useful and it does not require [Microsoft.AspNet.Cryptography.KeyDerivation].

    private static bool SlowEquals(byte[] a, byte[] b)
            {
                uint diff = (uint)a.Length ^ (uint)b.Length;
                for (int i = 0; i < a.Length && i < b.Length; i++)
                    diff |= (uint)(a[i] ^ b[i]);
                return diff == 0;
            }

    private static byte[] PBKDF2(string password, byte[] salt, int iterations, int outputBytes)
            {
                Rfc2898DeriveBytes pbkdf2 = new Rfc2898DeriveBytes(password, salt);
                pbkdf2.IterationCount = iterations;
                return pbkdf2.GetBytes(outputBytes);
            }

    private static string CreateHash(string value, int salt_bytes, int hash_bytes, int pbkdf2_iterations)
            {
                // Generate a random salt
                RNGCryptoServiceProvider csprng = new RNGCryptoServiceProvider();
                byte[] salt = new byte[salt_bytes];
                csprng.GetBytes(salt);

                // Hash the value and encode the parameters
                byte[] hash = PBKDF2(value, salt, pbkdf2_iterations, hash_bytes);

                //You need to return the salt value too for the validation process
                return Convert.ToBase64String(hash) + ":" + 
                       Convert.ToBase64String(hash);
            }

    private static bool ValidateHash(string pureVal, string saltVal, string hashVal, int pbkdf2_iterations)
            {
                try
                {
                    byte[] salt = Convert.FromBase64String(saltVal);
                    byte[] hash = Convert.FromBase64String(hashVal);

                    byte[] testHash = PBKDF2(pureVal, salt, pbkdf2_iterations, hash.Length);
                    return SlowEquals(hash, testHash);
                }
                catch (Exception ex)
                {
                    return false;
                }
            }

Please pay attention SlowEquals function that is so important, Finally, I hope this help and Please don't hesitate to advise me about better approaches.