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📘 How a password hash protects a secret

Follow one-way functions, salts, work factors, verification, guessing, peppers, and upgrades.

lessons

~10 min

to learn

🔬 Science

subject

Adults

level

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What you’ll learn

Plaintext
One-way
Salt
Work factor
Verification
Guessing
Pepper
Algorithms
Strength
Upgrade

Questions this course answers

Why should passwords not be stored plaintext?

Plaintext storage gives an attacker the original credentials immediately.

What does a salt do?

A per-password random salt defeats shared precomputed results.

Why use a slow password function?

Slow, memory-hard work factors hinder mass offline guessing.

How is a password verified?

Verification recomputes the one-way derivation and checks for a match.

What is a pepper?

A pepper is optional defense in depth and must remain secret.

Grounded in trusted sources

[object Object]
[object Object]
[object Object]
[object Object]

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

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