Password storage

GitLab stores user passwords in a hashed format to prevent passwords from being stored as plain text.

GitLab uses the Devise authentication library to hash user passwords. Created password hashes have these attributes:

• Hashing: The bcrypt hashing function is used to generate the hash of the provided password. This is a strong, industry-standard cryptographic hashing function.
• Stretching: Password hashes are stretched to harden against brute-force attacks. By default, GitLab uses a stretching factor of 10.
• Salting: A cryptographic salt is added to each password to harden against pre-computed hash and dictionary attacks. To increase security, each salt is randomly generated for each password, with no two passwords sharing a salt.