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Does it buy you anything at that point? A server-side issue, such as this, would still log the thing you need to log in, and a client-side issue would just intercept the hashed form or could derive the hashing mechanism from analysing the client.

At most, it would seem to prevent weak passwords from being passed directly to bcrypt, but salting should solve that in a similar way anyway, and anyone brute-forcing a copy of the database can incorporate the same weak hashing logic



Another comment in this thread mentioned an idea of seeding the hash with a quickly expiring nonce fetched from the server. I think that’s a quite clever approach, similar to CSRF tokens in a sense.

That would effectively create a one time “password” for transmission from browser to database. In a case like this one, where sensitive text transmitted from the client leaked into logs, it would be a non-issue. The sensitive string in the logs is a temporary hash that would be useless shortly after discovery, since it was derived from an expired nonce.

It effectively becomes a real time scrubbing system with 100% coverage, because the passwords are “scrubbed” by design, and do not depend on explicit detection code in some scrubbing mechanism.




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