This oral history of password storage on the Web originally appeared as a remark in the #infosec channel of the Hangops slack—the conversation had turned to a mention of “hashed, salted passwords” in a breach announcement in a way that made me suspect at least some of our friends had not studied the topic in detail. Several participants then encouraged me to expand the remark into a blog post, and now here we are.While I was around for some of this, much of it predates my career; everything is as accurate as I can reasonably make it, but corrections of gross errors are welcomed.The first time people attempt to design a Web login system, they will usually default to simply inserting their users’ passwords in their database. This solution is simple, obvious, and wrong.The problem is that database storage is not nearly as private as we would all like it to be. Even the databases that we’d