‘Splintering’ - a new encryption method makes password hacking 14 million percent more challenging
A new splintering technique in Tide Protocol has been found by its researchers. This technique takes encrypted passwords within an authentication system, breaks them up into multiple splinters or fragments, and stores them on a decentralized distributed network from where they can be reassembled when required.
The number of splinters that each encrypted password is broken up depends upon the desired cryptographic strength and the organization’s requirements.
It takes a minimum of 20 nodes in which each is assigned to a splinter and can be assembled when requested.
Splintering allows up to 30% redundancy, which means that the splintered passwords can be fully reassembled even if up to 6 nodes storing the splinters were to become unavailable for some reason.
End-to-end latency results showed that the splintering process takes between 1,500 milliseconds to 4,000 milliseconds with a full complement of nodes across Microsoft Azure, Google, and Amazon networks.