The concept of key stretching is to insert a random set of characters to increase the size of the password hash, making things harder for a brute-force attack:
- BCRYPT: BCRYPT is a password-hashing algorithm based on the Blowfish cipher. It is used to salt the passwords; a random string is inserted to increase the password length to help protect against rainbow table attacks. It also has an adaptive function where the iteration count can be increased to make it slower, so it remains resistant to attacks even with increasing computation power.
- PBKDF2: PBKDF2 stores passwords with a random salt and with the password hash using HMAC; it then iterates, which forces the regeneration of every password and prevents any rainbow table attack.
