summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/doc/security/password_storage.md
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to 'doc/security/password_storage.md')
-rw-r--r--doc/security/password_storage.md13
1 files changed, 13 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/doc/security/password_storage.md b/doc/security/password_storage.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..f4e32f96f7b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/doc/security/password_storage.md
@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
+---
+type: reference
+---
+
+# Password Storage
+
+GitLab stores user passwords in a hashed format, to prevent passwords from being visible.
+
+GitLab uses the [Devise](https://github.com/plataformatec/devise) authentication library, which handles the hashing of user passwords. Password hashes are created with the following attributes:
+
+- **Hashing**: the [bcrypt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_stretching) to harden against brute-force attacks. GitLab uses a stretching 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.