ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Salt (cryptography)

Salt in cryptography is like adding extra ingredients when baking cookies to make them more secure and harder to guess.

When we want to store passwords or sensitive information in a computer, we don't want anyone to be able to see them. So we use cryptography, which is like a secret code that only we know how to decode.

But sometimes, hackers have tools that can guess what the secret code is by trying every possible combination of letters and numbers until they find the right one. This is called a brute-force attack.

To prevent this, we add salt to our secret code. Salt is a random string of characters that we add to the password before we encode it. It's like adding extra ingredients to the cookie dough before baking, so that even if someone guesses the basic recipe, they still won't know what the cookies taste like with the extra ingredients.

When we add salt to our password, we make it much harder to guess the code. Even if a hacker knows the password, they won't be able to access anything because they need to know the salt too. It's like having a secret handshake that only the people who know it can use.

So, adding salt to our password is like adding extra security to our accounts and information, like adding sprinkles to our cookies to make them more special and harder to resist.