Hashing SSNs and other limited-domain information
I'm currently working on an application where we receive private health information. One of the biggest concerns is with the SSN. Currently, we don't use the SSN for anything, but in the future we'd like to be able to use it to uniquely identify a patient across multiple facilities. The only way I can see to do that reliably is through the SSN. However, we (in addition to our customers) REALLY don't want to store the SSN.
So naturally, I thought of just SHA hashing it since we're just using it for identification. The problem with that is that if an attacker knows the problem domain (an SSN), then they can focus on that domain. So it's much easier to calculate the billion SSNs rather than a virtually unlimited number of passwords. I know I should use a site salt and a per-patient salt, but is there anything else I can do to prevent an attacker from revealing the SSN? Instead of SHA, I was planning on using BCrypt, since Ruby has a good library and it handles scalable complexity and salting automagically.
It's not going to be used as a password. Essentially, we get messages from many facilities, and each describes a patient. The only thing close to a globally unique identifier for a patient is the SSN number. We are going to use the hash to identify the same patient at multiple facilities.
Answer
The algorithm for generating Social Security Numbers was created before the concept of a modern hacker and as a consequence they are extremely predictable. Using a SSN for authentication is a very bad idea, it really doesn't matter what cryptographic primitive you use or how large your salt value is. At the end of the day the "secret" that you are trying to protect doesn't have much entropy.
If you never need to know the plain text then you should use SHA-256. SHA-256 is a very good function to use for passwords.