Cisco Cyber Security Practice Exam 2026 – Your All-in-One Guide to Exam Success!

Using a unique salt for each password is an essential best practice in password storage because it significantly enhances security by ensuring that even if two users have identical passwords, their respective hashed passwords will be different due to the unique salt values. This uniqueness prevents attackers from effectively using precomputed tables, such as rainbow tables, to crack passwords. When salts are unique, it forces an attacker to compute the hash for each user separately, increasing the computational effort required to perform a successful attack.

In this context, a salt is a random value added to the password before hashing, which helps defend against attacks that exploit common passwords. Employing unique salts means that attackers cannot leverage the same hash value across different accounts, making it much more difficult for them to compromise multiple accounts with similar passwords. This practice is a key aspect of protecting user credentials and maintaining overall system security.