isabella232 / scrypt-1

The scrypt key derivation function was originally developed for use in the Tarsnap online backup system and is designed to be far more secure against hardware brute-force attacks than alternative functions such as PBKDF2 or bcrypt.

Firebase Authentication Password Hashing

Firebase Authentication uses an internally modified version of scrypt to hash account passwords. Even when an account is uploaded with a password using a different algorithm, Firebase Auth will rehash the password the first time that account successfully logs in. Accounts downloaded from Firebase Authentication will only ever contain a password hash if one for this version of scrypt is available, or contain an empty password hash otherwise.

See README_SCRYPT for more information about the scrypt library.

Table of Contents

• Finding the Password Hash Parameters
• Downloading User Accounts
• Building
• Password Hashing
• Other languages

Finding the Password Hash Parameters

Firebase generates unique password hash parameters for each Firebase project. To access these parameters, navigate to the 'Users' tab of the 'Authentication' section in the Firebase Console and select 'Password Hash Parameters' from the drop down in the upper-right hand corner of the users table.

Downloading User Accounts

The auth:export command is usd to export user accounts to JSON and CSV files. Please visit https://firebase.google.com/docs/cli/auth to learn more about exporting your project's users accounts. For password hashing, you will need the Password Hash and Password Salt fields for the exported accounts.

Building

To build scrypt, see the BUILDING file.

Password Hashing

A simple password-based encryption utility is available as a demonstration of the scrypt library. It can be invoked as scrypt {key} {salt} {rounds} {memcost} [-P]. The utility will ask for a plain text password and output a hash upon success. This hash should be encoded to base64 and compared to the password hash of the exported user account.

• {key} - The signer key from the project's password hash parameters. This key must be decoded from base64 before being passed to the utility.
• {salt} - Concatenation of the password salt from the exported account and the salt separator from the project's password hash parameters. Each half must be decoded from base64 before concatenation.
• {rounds} - The rounds parameter from the project's password hash parameters.
• {memcost} - The mem_cost parameter from the project's password hash parameters.
• [-P] - An optional -P may also be supplied to allow for the raw text password to be read from STDIN.

Sample Password hash parameters from Firebase Console:

hash_config {
  algorithm: SCRYPT,
  base64_signer_key: jxspr8Ki0RYycVU8zykbdLGjFQ3McFUH0uiiTvC8pVMXAn210wjLNmdZJzxUECKbm0QsEmYUSDzZvpjeJ9WmXA==,
  base64_salt_separator: Bw==,
  rounds: 8,
  mem_cost: 14,
}

Exporting a project's accounts:

# Export a project's accounts to a local csv file
$ firebase auth:export --project my-awesome-project-42be4 users.csv
# Inspect the exported accounts
$ cat users.csv
kYi4EvWQlQTKSfnJ3dRSP6IH3ed2,[email protected],false,lSrfV15cpx95/sZS2W9c9Kp6i/LVgQNDNC/qzrCnh1SAyZvqmZqAjTdn3aoItz+VHjoZilo78198JAdRuid5lQ==,42xEC+ixf3L2lw==,Test
User 1,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,1508893925000,1508893925000,,

Using the utility:

# Params from the project's password hash parameters
base64_signer_key="jxspr8Ki0RYycVU8zykbdLGjFQ3McFUH0uiiTvC8pVMXAn210wjLNmdZJzxUECKbm0QsEmYUSDzZvpjeJ9WmXA=="
base64_salt_separator="Bw=="
rounds=8
memcost=14

# Params from the exported account
base64_salt="42xEC+ixf3L2lw=="

# The users raw text password
password="user1password"

# Generate the hash
# Expected output:
# lSrfV15cpx95/sZS2W9c9Kp6i/LVgQNDNC/qzrCnh1SAyZvqmZqAjTdn3aoItz+VHjoZilo78198JAdRuid5lQ==
echo `./scrypt "$base64_signer_key" "$base64_salt" "$base64_salt_separator" "$rounds" "$memcost" -P <<< "$password"`

Other Languages

Thank you to members of the Firebase community that have ported this library to other languages! See the examples below:

• firebase-scrypt-java by SmartMoveSystems
• firebase-scrypt-python by JaakkoL