Excel Security Salt / Cipher Seed Generator Template
I’m back to dabbling with web development, and am planning a comprehensive overhaul of ThatsWACC.com, which will support user accounts and will require a backend database.
Current best practices for storing user passwords require the passwords to be encrypted using a ‘Salt’, which involves hashing the password text with a 40 character string and only storing the resulting output. In this way, even the database administrator can’t figure out what the ‘clear text’ password is.
The 40 character ‘salt’ string can (and should) be a combination of upper-case, lower-case, and numeric characters. I was too lazy to come up with anything better than “asdf” 10 times in a row, but thought that might be a weak key. I found a few sites online that would generate these for me, but had a nagging suspicion that these sites might be hosted by Russian hackers who would love to keep track of every security Salt used on the web. So I made an Excel spreadsheet that would run on a LOCAL machine, with no macros, that I and anyone else could use to generate Security Salt keys no one else would possibly be able to access. It’s Kludgy, but it’s also simple and it works, so I’m posting in here in case anyone else finds it useful.
Click here to download the Security_Salt_maker.XLS