phc-discussions - Re: [PHC] Are password trailing 0's a problem?

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Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 09:04:30 -0700
From: Taylor Hornby <havoc@...use.ca>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] Are password trailing 0's a problem?

On 03/07/2014 03:34 AM, Bill Cox wrote:
> I noticed that any password used in PBKDF2 gives the same result as
> that password with 0's appended any number of times up to a total
> length of 64 bytes.  Is this a problem?  A way around this would be to
> add the password length to the data hashed.  Since I always call
> PBKDF2 with c ==1 (1 repetition), this is the only input parameter
> which can change without changing the output.

Is that part of the PBKDF2 specification, or an artifact of using a
null-terminated string as the password parameter?

I infer from the following test vector (RFC 6070) that zero bytes should
be allowed in passwords (and salts):

     Input:
       P = "pass\0word" (9 octets)
       S = "sa\0lt" (5 octets)
       c = 4096
       dkLen = 16

     Output:
       DK = 56 fa 6a a7 55 48 09 9d
            cc 37 d7 f0 34 25 e0 c3 (16 octets)

-- 
Taylor Hornby