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Provide details on how GitLab stores passwords, including hashing, stretching, and salting. This was driven by a customer asking for this information for a security compliance audit report.
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Password Storage
GitLab stores user passwords in a hashed format, to prevent passwords from being visible.
GitLab uses the Devise authentication library, which handles the hashing of user passwords. Password hashes are created with the following attributes:
- Hashing: the bcrypt hashing function is used to generate the hash of the provided password. This is a strong, industry-standard cryptographic hashing function.
- Stretching: Password hashes are stretched to harden against brute-force attacks. GitLab uses a streching factor of 10 by default.
- Salting: A [cryptographic salt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography) is added to each password to harden against pre-computed hash and dictionary attacks. Each salt is randomly generated for each password, so that no two passwords share a salt to further increase security.