I have a question I haven't been able to find an answer to, hopefully someone here can help.
Why is HMAC+(hash) considered secure, while being considerably faster than say bcrypt with a cost of 12? For example, if a service used a user provided password to validate a "secret" (what would normally be the signed message), is that less secure than bcrypt? If so, what makes guessing the secret used in HMAC difficult?
Presumably you will use a key-stretching algorithm before applying HMAC.
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So yes, directly using a password in HMAC is a bad idea, and less secure than using some function designed for deriving keys from passwords.
You are confusing two things about sha-1. Assuming a 100% secure cryptographic hash function that is as fast as sha-1, you should not use it directly for hashing passwords (though it can be part of a larger construction like PBKDF2).
This is because the number of passwords you can check per second in an offline attack is related to the speed of the hash function, and bcrypt (and pbkdf2, and scrypt, argon2) are all various ways of slowing down the hashing process.
Similarly it is likely that md5 would be roughly as secure for protecting passwords as sha-256 when used in pbkdf2 because the known weaknesses of md5 would not be of assistance in performing a dictionary attack against a hashed password.
If you have a high-quality key then HMAC is secure without needing the hash function to be slow, so if you wanted to use a password with HMAC, you would first use a KDF to generate a high-quality key from the password, and then use the key in hmac. This is similar for any cryptographic tool that wants a high-quality key as input (i.e. most of them).
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A shorter answer is that HMAC is secure and fast because its input key already has sufficient entropy. bcrypt is slow because its whole point is to make it difficult to attack a key with low entropy.
Thanks for the varying levels of explanation (thanks to viraptor too). I think part of the reason I was confused is because GitHub's web hook setup allows for a supplied shared secret which, based on what I understand from above, is not as secure as it could be unless the user ensures the shared secret has sufficient entropy. If I'm still not getting it please let me know. Thanks again.
A quick 30s scan of the webhooks docs looks like that is correct; if you used e.g. 12345 as your secret, you would be susceptible to a dictionary attack from anybody who was able to record a message, on the order of 10s of billions of keys per second can be tested with a multi-GPU setup.
I suspect that the web hooks typically run over TLS, so recording the plaintext of a request would be a challenge in and of itself.
If your shared secret is vulnerable to brute forcing, it's vulnerable to brute forcing. An easy fix for this: generate your shared secret by hashing or salthashing a low-entropy password.
As a general rule though, HMAC is used with randomly generated secrets. I don't know why GitHub doesn't just tell you the secret.
so you would have to find a collision of one key that matches collision of another key, so you're back to relying on basic birthday attack rather than any specific hash weakness.
bcrypt and HMAC fill different roles and have different security properties: bcrypt is a key-derivation function, and HMAC is a message authentication code. They're not comparable. In particular, HMAC should be used with a high-quality key; bcrypt is for deriving high-quality keys from lower-quality keys.
You can move to more modern algorithms, but there isn't a pressing need to remove SHA1 implementations for that application.