Salt Generator

Generate a password salt

A salt is a random value added to a password before it is hashed, and it is essential to secure password storage. This generator produces cryptographically random salts in both hexadecimal and base64. Salting means that two users with the same password get different hashes, and it defeats precomputed rainbow-table attacks, because an attacker would need a separate table for every possible salt. A unique salt should be generated for each password and stored alongside its hash.

Sixteen random bytes is a common, ample salt length, giving an astronomically large number of possible values.

Why salting matters

Without a salt, identical passwords produce identical hashes, so an attacker who cracks one instantly knows every account using that password, and can use precomputed tables to reverse common hashes instantly. A unique random salt per password eliminates both problems, forcing an attacker to attack each password individually. Modern password-hashing algorithms like bcrypt and Argon2 generate and store a salt automatically, but understanding salts is fundamental.

The salt does not need to be secret, only unique and random, so it is stored in plain form with the hash. These salts are generated locally and never transmitted. All generation happens locally in your browser.

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