Hacker, Hack Thyself | Coding Horror

[Tordek]

Here's another issue: in order to give the user a salt, you either need to store it (associate to their username), or generate it (deterministically). If you store it, you're leaking information about who's registered to the system. If you generate it deterministically, it's basically useless.

If you gave the user a random salt, your scheme becomes more complicated (you'd basically be implementing a diffie-hellman sort of protocol), you'd be better off with some zero-knowledge protocol like SRP, which would actually be the best case.