What is the optimal length for user password salt?
Any salt at all will obviously help when salting and hashing a user's password. Are there any best practices for how long the salt should be? I'll be storing the salt in my user table, so I would like the best tradeoff between storage size and security. Is a random 10 character salt enough? Or do I need something longer?
Answer
Most of these answers are a bit misguided and demonstrate a confusion between salts and cryptographic keys. The purpose of including salts is to modify the function used to hash each user's password so that each stored password hash will have to be attacked individually. The only security requirement is that they are unique per user, there is no benefit in them being unpredictable or difficult to guess.
Salts only need to be long enough so that each user's salt will be unique. Random 64-bit salts are very unlikely to ever repeat even with a billion registered users, so this should be fine. A singly repeated salt is a relatively minor security concern, it allows an attacker to search two accounts at once but in the aggregate won't speed up the search much on the whole database. Even 32-bit salts are acceptable for most purposes, it will in the worst case speed an attacker's search by about 58%. The cost of increasing salts beyond 64 bits isn't high but there is no security reason to do so.
There is some benefit to also using a site-wide salt on top of the per-user salt, this will prevent possible collisions with password hashes stored at other sites, and prevent the use of general-purpose rainbow tables, although even 32 bits of salt is enough to make rainbow tables an impractical attack.
Even simpler-and developers always overlook this-if you have unique user IDs or login names, those serve perfectly fine as a salt. If you do this, you should add a site-wide salt to ensure you don't overlap with users of another system who had the same bright idea.