">But isn't the SSH private key also stored in plain text?
no, passwording the key encrypts it
>I mean, yeah, you could also have a password for that key, but then most people use ssh-agent because typing that key every single time is annoying, which means the password is somewhere in memory. Or you could just install a keylogger on it and wait for the user to login.
ssh-agent does not expose the private key to clients requesting it, thats part of its design, you can however get a login session to whatever hosts it holds keys for.
> Isn't that still security by obscurity?
That is much more involved than a hit and run attack where you download the DB, and much more likely to be detected/detectable before any harm is done, via such things as IDS, or just plain not possible due to how a system is locked down (stuff like ssh gateways that are heavily secured, etc).
>Instead we should rely on computational complexity ... there are limits to what we can compute when exponential complexity is involved.
the point of bcrypt isnt JUST that it is slow, its that each step requires the data from the previous step, many thousands of times over, that makes it impossible to parallelize across many GPU cores or similar arangements, thats a huge part of the weakness of stuff like plain hashing/salting, its trivial to parallelize and to scale up that parellelization till you are generating billions, or even trillions of hashes a second, that approch is totally useless on bcrypt."
">But isn't the SSH private key also stored in plain text?
no, passwording the key encrypts it
>I mean, yeah, you could also have a password for that key, but then most people use ssh-agent because typing that key every single time is annoying, which means the password is somewhere in memory. Or you could just install a keylogger on it and wait for the user to login.
ssh-agent does not expose the private key to clients requesting it, thats part of its design, you can however get a login session to whatever hosts it holds keys for.
> Isn't that still security by obscurity?
That is much more involved than a hit and run attack where you download the DB, and much more likely to be detected/detectable before any harm is done, via such things as IDS, or just plain not possible due to how a system is locked down (stuff like ssh gateways that are heavily secured, etc).
>Instead we should rely on computational complexity ... there are limits to what we can compute when exponential complexity is involved.
the point of bcrypt isnt JUST that it is slow, its that each step requires the data from the previous step, many thousands of times over, that makes it impossible to parallelize across many GPU cores or similar arangements, thats a huge part of the weakness of stuff like plain hashing/salting, its trivial to parallelize and to scale up that parellelization till you are generating billions, or even trillions of hashes a second, that approch is totally useless on bcrypt."