Moving to client-side hashing for online authentication

Abstract

Credential leaks still happen with regular frequency, and show evidence that, despite decades of warnings, password hashing is still not correctly implemented in practice. The common practice today, inherited from previous but obsolete constraints, is to transmit the password in cleartext to the server, where it is hashed and stored. We investigate the advantages and drawbacks of the alternative of hashing client-side, and show that it is present today exclusively on Chinese websites. We also look at ways to implement it on a large scale in the near future.