Password management is something that should generally not be reinvented unnecessarily, and Django endeavors to provide a secure and flexible set of tools for managing user passwords. This document describes how Django stores passwords, how the storage hashing can be configured, and some utilities to work with hashed passwords.
The password
attribute of a
User
object is a string in this format:
<algorithm>$<iterations>$<salt>$<hash>
Those are the components used for storing a User’s password, separated by the dollar-sign character and consist of: the hashing algorithm, the number of algorithm iterations (work factor), the random salt, and the resulting password hash. The algorithm is one of a number of one-way hashing or password storage algorithms Django can use; see below. Iterations describe the number of times the algorithm is run over the hash. Salt is the random seed used and the hash is the result of the one-way function.
By default, Django uses the PBKDF2 algorithm with a SHA256 hash, a password stretching mechanism recommended by NIST. This should be sufficient for most users: it’s quite secure, requiring massive amounts of computing time to break.
However, depending on your requirements, you may choose a different algorithm, or even use a custom algorithm to match your specific security situation. Again, most users shouldn’t need to do this – if you’re not sure, you probably don’t. If you do, please read on:
Django chooses the algorithm to use by consulting the
PASSWORD_HASHERS
setting. This is a list of hashing algorithm
classes that this Django installation supports. The first entry in this list
(that is, settings.PASSWORD_HASHERS[0]
) will be used to store passwords,
and all the other entries are valid hashers that can be used to check existing
passwords. This means that if you want to use a different algorithm, you’ll
need to modify PASSWORD_HASHERS
to list your preferred algorithm
first in the list.
The default for PASSWORD_HASHERS
is:
PASSWORD_HASHERS = (
'django.contrib.auth.hashers.PBKDF2PasswordHasher',
'django.contrib.auth.hashers.PBKDF2SHA1PasswordHasher',
'django.contrib.auth.hashers.BCryptPasswordHasher',
'django.contrib.auth.hashers.SHA1PasswordHasher',
'django.contrib.auth.hashers.MD5PasswordHasher',
'django.contrib.auth.hashers.CryptPasswordHasher',
)
This means that Django will use PBKDF2 to store all passwords, but will support checking passwords stored with PBKDF2SHA1, bcrypt, SHA1, etc. The next few sections describe a couple of common ways advanced users may want to modify this setting.
Bcrypt is a popular password storage algorithm that’s specifically designed for long-term password storage. It’s not the default used by Django since it requires the use of third-party libraries, but since many people may want to use it Django supports bcrypt with minimal effort.
To use Bcrypt as your default storage algorithm, do the following:
Install the py-bcrypt library (probably by running sudo pip install
py-bcrypt
, or downloading the library and installing it with python
setup.py install
).
Modify PASSWORD_HASHERS
to list BCryptPasswordHasher
first. That is, in your settings file, you’d put:
PASSWORD_HASHERS = (
'django.contrib.auth.hashers.BCryptPasswordHasher',
'django.contrib.auth.hashers.PBKDF2PasswordHasher',
'django.contrib.auth.hashers.PBKDF2SHA1PasswordHasher',
'django.contrib.auth.hashers.SHA1PasswordHasher',
'django.contrib.auth.hashers.MD5PasswordHasher',
'django.contrib.auth.hashers.CryptPasswordHasher',
)
(You need to keep the other entries in this list, or else Django won’t be able to upgrade passwords; see below).
That’s it – now your Django install will use Bcrypt as the default storage algorithm.
Password truncation with BCryptPasswordHasher
The designers of bcrypt truncate all passwords at 72 characters which means
that bcrypt(password_with_100_chars) == bcrypt(password_with_100_chars[:72])
.
BCryptPasswordHasher
does not have any special handling and
thus is also subject to this hidden password length limit. The practical
ramification of this truncation is pretty marginal as the average user does
not have a password greater than 72 characters in length and even being
truncated at 72 the compute powered required to brute force bcrypt in any
useful amount of time is still astronomical.
Other bcrypt implementations
There are several other implementations that allow bcrypt to be
used with Django. Django’s bcrypt support is NOT directly
compatible with these. To upgrade, you will need to modify the
hashes in your database to be in the form bcrypt$(raw bcrypt
output)
. For example:
bcrypt$$2a$12$NT0I31Sa7ihGEWpka9ASYrEFkhuTNeBQ2xfZskIiiJeyFXhRgS.Sy
.
The PBKDF2 and bcrypt algorithms use a number of iterations or rounds of
hashing. This deliberately slows down attackers, making attacks against hashed
passwords harder. However, as computing power increases, the number of
iterations needs to be increased. We’ve chosen a reasonable default (and will
increase it with each release of Django), but you may wish to tune it up or
down, depending on your security needs and available processing power. To do so,
you’ll subclass the appropriate algorithm and override the iterations
parameters. For example, to increase the number of iterations used by the
default PBKDF2 algorithm:
Create a subclass of django.contrib.auth.hashers.PBKDF2PasswordHasher
:
from django.contrib.auth.hashers import PBKDF2PasswordHasher
class MyPBKDF2PasswordHasher(PBKDF2PasswordHasher):
"""
A subclass of PBKDF2PasswordHasher that uses 100 times more iterations.
"""
iterations = PBKDF2PasswordHasher.iterations * 100
Save this somewhere in your project. For example, you might put this in
a file like myproject/hashers.py
.
Add your new hasher as the first entry in PASSWORD_HASHERS
:
PASSWORD_HASHERS = (
'myproject.hashers.MyPBKDF2PasswordHasher',
'django.contrib.auth.hashers.PBKDF2PasswordHasher',
'django.contrib.auth.hashers.PBKDF2SHA1PasswordHasher',
'django.contrib.auth.hashers.BCryptPasswordHasher',
'django.contrib.auth.hashers.SHA1PasswordHasher',
'django.contrib.auth.hashers.MD5PasswordHasher',
'django.contrib.auth.hashers.CryptPasswordHasher',
)
That’s it – now your Django install will use more iterations when it stores passwords using PBKDF2.
When users log in, if their passwords are stored with anything other than the preferred algorithm, Django will automatically upgrade the algorithm to the preferred one. This means that old installs of Django will get automatically more secure as users log in, and it also means that you can switch to new (and better) storage algorithms as they get invented.
However, Django can only upgrade passwords that use algorithms mentioned in
PASSWORD_HASHERS
, so as you upgrade to new systems you should make
sure never to remove entries from this list. If you do, users using un-
mentioned algorithms won’t be able to upgrade.
django.contrib.auth.hashers
module provides a set of functions
to create and validate hashed password. You can use them independently
from the User
model.check_password
(password, encoded)¶If you’d like to manually authenticate a user by comparing a plain-text
password to the hashed password in the database, use the convenience
function check_password()
. It takes two arguments: the plain-text
password to check, and the full value of a user’s password
field in the
database to check against, and returns True
if they match, False
otherwise.
make_password
(password[, salt, hashers])¶Creates a hashed password in the format used by this application. It takes
one mandatory argument: the password in plain-text. Optionally, you can
provide a salt and a hashing algorithm to use, if you don’t want to use the
defaults (first entry of PASSWORD_HASHERS
setting).
Currently supported algorithms are: 'pbkdf2_sha256'
, 'pbkdf2_sha1'
,
'bcrypt'
(see Using bcrypt with Django), 'sha1'
, 'md5'
,
'unsalted_md5'
(only for backward compatibility) and 'crypt'
if you have the crypt
library installed. If the password argument is
None
, an unusable password is returned (a one that will be never
accepted by check_password()
).
is_password_usable
(encoded_password)¶Checks if the given string is a hashed password that has a chance
of being verified against check_password()
.
Apr 12, 2017