ASP.NET Identity Core 1.0.0 (Under the Hood) Part 1. Where did my salt column go?

Let me prefix this post / series of blog posts with two important notes.

  1. I am not a security expert. This series of posts records my own dive into the ASP.NET Identity Core code, publicly available on GitHub which I’ve done for my own self-interest to try and understand how it works and what is available to me as a developer. Do not assume everything I have interpreted to be 100% accurate or any code samples as suitable copy and paste production code.
  2. This is written whilst reviewing source mostly from the 3.0.0-rc1 release tag. I may stray into more recent dev code if implementations have changed considerably, but will try to highlight when I do so. One very important point here is that at the time of writing this post Microsoft have announced a renaming strategy for ASP.NET 5. Due to the brand new codebase this is now being called ASP.NET Core 1.0 and the underlying .NET Core will be .Net Core 1.0. This is going to result in namespace changes. I’ve used the anticipated new namespaces here (and will update if things change again).

Goals of this post / series

My personal reasons for digging into this code in the first place are simply to learn and further my own understanding. I’ll be investigating the sections that interest me and summarising as I do. I’m not sure where my investigations will take me so this may one post or many. I’m blogging about my findings as I hope they may be of interest to others wanting to know more about what happens when using this library in your projects. I’m going to try to edit this together in a readable fashion but I do expect it may be a little jumpy as I focus on the parts of the code I personally wanted to know more about. If you’re reading this blog post and see errors (and I expect there will be some) then please comment or contact me so I can update as appropriate.

Password Basics

I feel that before I go further I should try to explain a few key terms and concepts around password security. There are many more detailed resources which discuss security that go deeper into this but this primer should help when reading the rest of the post. If you know all of this then you may want to skip down to the next section below where I’ll start looking at the ASP.NET Identity code specifically.

With any login system, at a minimum we need to store two key pieces of information. A username and a password. The username uniquely identifies the user within your application and the password is a piece of information that only they should hold, used to verify to the application that they are, who they claim to be. This is the concept of authentication within a software application. In order for our applications to work with users we need to store these pieces of information somewhere so that when the user provides them, the application can look them up and compare them. Very commonly this will involve a database store and in ASP.NET that will likely be an SQL database table.

A simple solution would be to store the username as a string value (VARCHAR) and perhaps do the same for the password. This meets the initial requirement as we can now compare these against what a user provides us and if they match, open the door to the application. But there is a lot more to be considered and the most important element is securing that password from malicious intent. The problem being faced is how to store the password in such a way that it’s not plainly readable to anyone who has, or gains access to the database in which it has been stored. It’s well accepted that people will take the path of least complexity with passwords and often use the same password in many places. They will also likely use the same username where they can (especially if that username is their email address). So the risks go way beyond just your application should a password be compromised. It could well open the door to many other places where your user has also registered.

While some might assume that the database is secure and provides all the safety one needs for their user’s data, recent and numerous data exposures have proven that there are many people out there who can probably get to the database if they want to. I’m not planning to dive into the ways and means of that now but if you want more info check out posts from the likes of Troy Hunt who cover some other security aspects to consider. Even if the database is not compromised storing the passwords in plain text would still be a very poor decision since your internal staff also should not have access to them. A password should be as a user expects and be a secret to themselves only. They should be able to expect that you will take due care and responsibility when working with such a piece of data.

So we now want to store the password in a form that is secure from anyone who is looking at the database table, but we also need to be able to verify the user at a later time by comparing their input, to the password stored for their account. A solution could be reversible encryption where we encrypt the password data when we save it to the database and then decrypt it later to compare it with user input. However that also has concerns and issues, again slightly outside the scope of my intentions for this blog post. The short version being that anything reversible still presents a fair degree of insecurity when it comes to passwords.

This is where the concept of a one way hash comes into the picture. A hash is a mathematically repeatable process whereby we can take the password, put it through hashing and then store that data, instead of a plain text password. The word “repeatable” is important here. The reason hashing works is that if you provide the same text and put it through the same hashing process, the result will always be the same. At login we take the provided password, hash it (using the same algorithm used when the password was first saved to the database) and then compare the hashed value against the stored value. If they match, we have authenticated the user.

The advantages are that if the database is compromised, the hashed value is more secure than plain text. The hash cannot be reversed to generate the original plain text password either. But we’re still not done. With the advent of faster processing, even hashes are breakable. For a start, users commonly use simple and guessable passwords. Attackers can take advantage of that by pre-calculating hash values for common passwords, using the same algorithms that an application might use to create a mapping between potential passwords and hashed passwords. They could then use this against a compromised database and quickly work out many of the passwords being used.

We therefore must again go a step further and try to secure against this. So finally we come to the concept of a salt which adds more complexity and uniqueness to the passwords being hashed. Think of an example where two users choose to use the same exact password for your system. Those passwords when hashed will be identical in the database. This could be valuable information to hackers. Therefore to make things more unique, we use a random set of characters, called a salt. This salt is added to the password so that we get a unique password and therefore unique hash for each user, even if they use the same passwords. This mainly helps defend from the dictionary based attacks as hackers would have to calculate the lookup table once per user with their salt.

Finally we have hashing iterations. Hashing once is a start but with modern computer power it’s pretty fast to generate a lookup table. Iterations help somewhat by making the process more computationally expensive and time consuming. The aim of which is to make hacking a password database too much work vs the potential reward.

ASP.NET Identity and Password Hashing

In Identity 2.0 the hashed password and the salt were stored in separate columns in the database. It was only when I looked at a database for a new ASP.NET Core website that I noticed that there was no salt column and I wondered what was happening (hence this blog post)!

So to understand let’s follow the flow of a registering user with a focus on the password so we can understand what ASP.NET Core Identity 1.0.0 is doing to securely save it to the database (and answer my question – where did the salt column go!)

We start in the AccountController with a call to CreateAsync in the Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.UserManager class passing in an IdentityUser object and the password to be hashed and saved.

After running through any password validators we call on an instance an  IPasswordHasher<TUser> (which is injected into the UserManager when it is first constructed).

The PasswordHasher is constructed with an instance of PasswordHasherOptions. The class PasswordHasherOptions defines the settings used for the password hashing. By default the compatibility mode is set to Identity v3 mode, but if you needed to support V2 and below this can be set in the options. There is also a setting for the iterations to use when creating the hash which by default is set to 10,000. Finally this class defines and creates a static instance of the RandomNumberGenerator object found in the mscorelib.

UserManager.CreateAsync calls the HashPassword method.

The HashPassword method checks the compatibility mode in the options and flows through the appropriate method to handle either V2 and V3 identity. We’ll look at the V3 flow here using HashPasswordV3.

Here is the code…

private byte[] HashPasswordV3(string password, RandomNumberGenerator rng)
{
    return HashPasswordV3(password, rng,
    prf: KeyDerivationPrf.HMACSHA256,
    iterCount: _iterCount,
    saltSize: 128 / 8,
    numBytesRequested: 256 / 8);
}

private static byte[] HashPasswordV3(string password, RandomNumberGenerator rng, KeyDerivationPrf prf, int iterCount, int saltSize, int numBytesRequested)
{
    // Produce a version 3 (see comment above) text hash.
    byte[] salt = new byte[saltSize];
    rng.GetBytes(salt);
    byte[] subkey = KeyDerivation.Pbkdf2(password, salt, prf, iterCount, numBytesRequested);

    var outputBytes = new byte[13 + salt.Length + subkey.Length];
    outputBytes[0] = 0x01; // format marker
    WriteNetworkByteOrder(outputBytes, 1, (uint)prf);
    WriteNetworkByteOrder(outputBytes, 5, (uint)iterCount);
    WriteNetworkByteOrder(outputBytes, 9, (uint)saltSize);
    Buffer.BlockCopy(salt, 0, outputBytes, 13, salt.Length);
    Buffer.BlockCopy(subkey, 0, outputBytes, 13 + saltSize, subkey.Length);
    return outputBytes;
}

Breaking down the parameters of the main overloaded method:

  1. A string representing the password to be hashed
  2. An instance of a RandomNumberGenerator (defined in the mscorelib assembly). I’m not going to delve into how that code works here but the CoreCLR project on GitHub contains the code if you want to take a look for yourself.
  3. A choice of the PRF (pseudorandom function family) to use for the key derivation. In this case HMACSHA256 is the standard for Identity V3
  4. An integer representing the iteration count to use when hashing (coming from the PasswordHasherOptions)
  5. The size (number of bytes) to be used for the salt – 128 bits / 8 to calculate the byte size of 16
  6. The number of bytes for the hashed password – 256 bits / 8 to calculate the byte size of 32

A new byte array is created to hold the 16 byte salt which is generated with a call to GetBytes(salt) on the RandomNumberGenerator. This populates the byte array with 16 random bytes. Then a hashed password is created using PBKDF2 (Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2) key derivation, taking the password, the salt, the PRF of HMACSHA256, the number of iterations to use and the number of bytes required as the length of the hashed password.

We now have a hashed password and the random salt used to generate that password. In earlier versions of identity I saw these being saved into two unique columns inside the database. However with Identity 3.0 / ASP.NET Core Identity 1.0 there is only the PasswordHash column. To save the password and hash a new byte array is created. It is the size of the salt + hashed password + 13 extra bytes used to store some meta data about the hashing which took place. These form a single byte array which will be base64 encoded as a string to save into the database.

Construction of the Final Byte Array

The first byte is a format marker and for Identity 3.0 / ASP.NET Core 1.0.0 this is set to 1 (defined in hex).

The next byte stores the PRF that was used. This is the value of the enum available in Microsoft.AspNetCore.Cryptography.KeyDerivation. This belongs in the ASP.NET DataProtection assembly (source on github)

The next 4 bytes store the iteration count used to generate the hash

The next 4 bytes store the salt size

Notice with each of these items there is a call to WriteNetworkByteOrder, a helper method within the PasswordHasher.


private static void WriteNetworkByteOrder(byte[] buffer, int offset, uint value)
{
    buffer[offset + 0] = (byte)(value >> 24);
    buffer[offset + 1] = (byte)(value >> 16);
    buffer[offset + 2] = (byte)(value >> 8);
    buffer[offset + 3] = (byte)(value >> 0);
}

What this is doing in short is splitting the 32 bit integer into the component bytes using bitwise shifting and then storing those in big-endian (network byte) order into the array.

HashPasswordV3 then copies in the bytes from the salt and the password hash to create the final byte array which is returned to the main HashPassword method. This is converted to a base64 encoded string. This is the string is then written to the to the database.

And there we have it. That’s a fairly deep dive of how passwords are hashed inside ASP.NET Core 1.0.0 identity and then stored in the database.


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Steve Gordon

Steve Gordon is a Pluralsight author, 6x Microsoft MVP, and a .NET engineer at Elastic where he maintains the .NET APM agent and related libraries. Steve is passionate about community and all things .NET related, having worked with ASP.NET for over 21 years. Steve enjoys sharing his knowledge through his blog, in videos and by presenting talks at user groups and conferences. Steve is excited to participate in the active .NET community and founded .NET South East, a .NET Meetup group based in Brighton. He enjoys contributing to and maintaining OSS projects. You can find Steve on most social media platforms as @stevejgordon

11 thoughts to “ASP.NET Identity Core 1.0.0 (Under the Hood) Part 1. Where did my salt column go?

  1. Thanks Steve, that was quite comprehensive explanation. I bumped onto your blog while looking for solution to have clear text password (that’s what they want) using asp.net core + identity. Can I just inject my version of IPasswordHasher which just returns clear text password? Any suggestion please?

    1. You’re welcome Pravin. That sounds like a very bad idea to me. Why would anyone want to reduce the level of security by applying a flawed security practice. I’d urge a review of that decision! You should be able to create a custom implementation of a hasher if you really must. Again, though, please don’t! No good can come of it!

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