How to decrypt hash stored by bcrypt

Question

I have this script that encrypts a password but I don't know how to reverse it and decrypt it. This may be a very simple answer but I don't understand how to do it.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Crypt::Eksblowfish::Bcrypt;
use Crypt::Random;

$password = 'bigtest';
$encrypted = encrypt_password($password);
print "$password is encrypted as $encrypted\n";

print "Yes the password is $password\n" if check_password($password, $encrypted);
print "No the password is not smalltest\n" if !check_password('smalltest', $encrypted);

# Encrypt a password 
sub encrypt_password {
    my $password = shift;

    # Generate a salt if one is not passed
    my $salt = shift || salt(); 

    # Set the cost to 8 and append a NUL
    my $settings = '$2a$08$'.$salt;

    # Encrypt it
    return Crypt::Eksblowfish::Bcrypt::bcrypt($password, $settings);
}

# Check if the passwords match
sub check_password {
    my ($plain_password, $hashed_password) = @_;

    # Regex to extract the salt
    if ($hashed_password =~ m!^\$2a\$\d{2}\$([A-Za-z0-9+\\.]{22})!) {
        return encrypt_password($plain_password, $1) eq $hashed_password;
    } else {
        return 0;
    }
}

# Return a random salt
sub salt {
    return Crypt::Eksblowfish::Bcrypt::en_base64(Crypt::Random::makerandom_octet(Length=>16));
}

Answer 1

You're HASHING, not ENCRYPTING!

What's the difference?

The difference is that hashing is a one way function, where encryption is a two-way function.

So, how do you ascertain that the password is right?

Therefore, when a user submits a password, you don't decrypt your stored hash, instead you perform the same bcrypt operation on the user input and compare the hashes. If they're identical, you accept the authentication.

Should you hash or encrypt passwords?

What you're doing now -- hashing the passwords -- is correct. If you were to simply encrypt passwords, a breach of security of your application could allow a malicious user to trivially learn all user passwords. If you hash (or better, salt and hash) passwords, the user needs to crack passwords (which is computationally expensive on bcrypt) to gain that knowledge.

As your users probably use their passwords in more than one place, this will help to protect them.