Salty Hashing

I threw up a stupid little gem the other day for salted hashing. It’s called salty (I couldn’t believe that wasn’t taken). Anyway, it’s nothing too special, I just got tired of constantly re-implementing password hashing code.

Just gem install salty to get it. Or you can just grab the one source file if you want, it’s less than 1KB

$ wget https://raw.github.com/alecbenzer/salty/master/lib/salty.rb

Usage is pretty simple:

require 'salty'

password = Salty.hash('thisismypassword')

Salty.check('thisismypassword',password) # => true
Salty.check('notmypassword',password) # => false

Salty.hash does an iterative salted SHA512 hash. The salt is randomly generated and emebded into the output hash, which Salty.check then extracts, so you don’t need to worry about it yourself.

Do realize though that Salty.hash isn’t like a normal hash function. Namely, repeated calls to it will generate different outputs (because each call generates a different salt), so things like Salty.hash(str) == Salty.hash(str) won’t work. You always need to use Salty.check.

You can check out the source on github.