node-argon2 VS CyberChef

❓ Why is hashing and salting passwords mandatory? A salt is simply a random data used as an additional input to the hashing function to safeguard your password. The random string from the salt makes the hash unpredictable. A password hash involves converting the password into an alphanumeric string using specialized algorithms. Hashing and salting are irreversible and ensure that even if someone gains access to the hashed passwords, they will not be able to decrypt them to recover the original passwords. Hystorically bcrypt is recognized as the best hashing algorithm. However, in terms of robustness against all the new cryptographic attacks targeting hashing algorithms, the current clear winner is argon2. However, since the “youth" (2015) of this algorithm, I chose to use bcrypt

Argon2: this is the newest highly recommended algorithm, and recommended by OWASP. (Edit: originally linked to a low-download library.)

Though I am using bcrypt to hash passwords, recommended approach currently is argon2

As per security.stackexchange.com the recommended number of rounds for Bcrypt is a number such that it takes atleast 250 ms to hash your password. Argon2 on the other hand takes multiple parameters it seems. What is the equivalent configuration you need for Argon2? I am talking about an express webserver here with passportjs if that helps

If you already have Bcrypt & want to start converting to Argon2, check out this guide → https://github.com/ranisalt/node-argon2/wiki/Migrating-from-another-hash-function

You can look at the argon2 npm (https://www.npmjs.com/package/argon2).

Then we take the encrypted text and use CyberChef to decrypt it.

Let's go to CyberChef and insert our pieces of evidence.

A parameter was changed from '2AMBCgIQBg' to 'CgIIAdgDAQ%3D%3D' which is just the correct base64 encoding they should have been using the entire time.

I don't think this was a hostile action by Google, I think someone just added better input validation for security reasons and it accidently broke the bad requests they were sending.

https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=URL_Decode()From_Ba...

❗This is indeed the flag, but the text is encrypted with Base64. Usually, the presence of padding character "=" indicates that's Base64 type of encoding (but that's only one of the hints). To decrypt it, we can use CyberChef. Copy-paste the text and we either:

It uses a combination of magic bytes (like the `file` command), entropy analysis and character frequency detection to determine whether an output is likely to be of interest to the user.

The file type mechanism is written here[0]. There's a list of all signatures we detect here[1].

[0] https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/blob/master/src/core/lib/F...

I think this can be deciphered using CyberChef...