(Caution: Amateur security research ahead.  Using it in a live system is not recommendable.) I recently read “How to Safely Store a Password”, an article by Coda Hale. For years I’ve thought that salting and hashing passwords with MD5 or SHA-1 prior to storage was sufficient to thwart password-cracking efforts (in cases where the user-account [...]

Last night I watched Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief on TV.  (Beware, spoilers ahead.) This moderately-entertaining movie cleverly incorporates a number of elements from Greek mythology.  One of them is the island of the lotus-eaters, reimagined as a casino. Percy Jackson and his two sidekicks need to visit this casino to look for [...]