CWE · MITRE source

CWE-760Use of a One-Way Hash with a Predictable Salt

Abstraction: Variant · CVEs in our corpus: 10

The product uses a one-way cryptographic hash against an input that should not be reversible, such as a password, but the product uses a predictable salt as part of the input.

This makes it easier for attackers to pre-compute the hash value using dictionary attack techniques such as rainbow tables, effectively disabling the protection that an unpredictable salt would provide. It should be noted that, despite common perceptions, the use of a good salt with a hash does not sufficiently increase the effort for an attacker who is targeting an individual password, or who has a large amount of computing resources available, such as with cloud-based services or specialized, inexpensive hardware. Offline password cracking can still be effective if the hash function is not expensive to compute; many cryptographic functions are designed to be efficient and can be vulnerable to attacks using massive computing resources, even if the hash is cryptographically strong. The use of a salt only slightly increases the computing requirements for an attacker compared to other strategies such as adaptive hash functions. See CWE-916 for more details.

Last updated: 04 July 2026 00:28 UTC