In network security, what is "salting"?

Salting refers to the practice of adding random data, known as a "salt," to passwords before they are hashed. This technique is crucial in enhancing the security of stored passwords. By incorporating a unique salt for each password, even if two users have the same password, the resulting hashes will be different. This greatly mitigates the risk of rainbow table attacks, where an attacker precomputes hashes of common passwords to facilitate rapid cracking. The unique salt ensures that attackers must generate new tables for each salted password, making it computationally infeasible to retrieve original passwords from the hashes without knowing the specific salt used.

In contrast, the other choices do not accurately describe salting in the context of network security. Applying additional security layers on all access points relates more to defense-in-depth strategies than to password protection. Compressing data serves performance enhancement purposes rather than security, and adjusting user login credentials does not encompass the concept of salting, which focuses specifically on the hashing process of passwords.