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this had me confused at first too, but I think the author's point is that if the initial data comes in a predictable form (e.g. an IP address that is x.x.x.x where x is 0-254, email addresses that are mostly short and ends in "gmail.com," etc), salts don't really save the hash from being brute forced, they just save the hash from being brute forced with a rainbow table. the author's post isn't about passwords, per se, but how the kind of datapoints we often hash for the sake of anonymization are really only pseudo-anonymous, or at least a lot weaker than people might expect for a string of x length.

that said, bcrypt, PBKDF2, and other time/work-based hashing solutions are still very good options for this.




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