Is it okay to store salts with hashes?

Question

My understanding is that a salt is not intended to be secret, it is merely intended to be different from any centralized standard so that you can\'t develop a rainbow table or s

Answer 1

The salt, by definition, must be random to be effective. Don't use any deterministic value for this. This of course implies that you need to store it in the database along with the hashed password. UNIX systems traditionally even store the hash in the same field as the password (the salt is a fixed-length prefix of the password). In a database, you can have additional column in the users table.