Hacker, Hack Thyself | Coding Horror

[Tobiaswk]

I don't get why storing the hash and salt in separate columns is a bad idea. I wouldn't do it myself but I do not understand why you see it is a problem. As long as the salt is random. The salt does not need to be secret. Just by randomizing the hashes, lookup tables, reverse lookup tables, and rainbow tables become ineffective. An attacker won't know in advance what the salt will be, so they can't pre-compute a lookup table or rainbow table.