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You're absolutely right.

PBKDF2 incoming.



You can do that, but a better API design is one that simply ensures keys are always random. KDF'd passwords are still weaker than real cryptographic keys.

A common design pattern is to use KDF keys as key-encrypting keys wrapping fully random keys. The system in steady-state relies only on the fully random key; the KDF key, depending on the design, can sometimes be kept offline. This is how SSH and GPG handle keys: note how the actual keys the system uses are fully random and totally out of the user's hands.

But you might not need any of this mechanism at all; it might be totally possible to design this system such that keys are simply blobs, generated via urandom by reading crypt.Rand.




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