[kh99]

Originally Posted by squidsk

If the hashes are stolen then the hash function used is irrelevant as with modern graphics cards being used for processing power over a couple of machines brute forcing is not a particularly arduous task...

Oh, I see what you meant. Yeah, that makes sense. But my understanding is that bcrypt was made to be slow and to be more difficult to implement using a GPU, by repeating the slower parts of the algorithm many times, so it's an improvement over using a hash algorithm directly. (What I said above wasn't quite correct - it's bcrypt that was designed to be slow, not blowfish, although bcrypt is based on blowfish).

But like you said it's likely passwords were discovered by trying a list of common or known passwords, so maybe using something that takes, for example, 1/2 second for the average server to check still isn't really slow enough to make a difference.

Edit: The first answer here has a good summary: http://security.stackexchange.com/qu...passwords?lq=1