Increase salt rounds for new passwords, and update hash with more salt rounds for old passwords

[christopherholland-workday]

Overview

Today, the application defaults to 5 salt rounds, increasing to 10 which is suggested by OWASP.

Additionally, adding a check to the login method to see if the existing has uses 10 rounds or not using the bcrypt.getRounds() method, and updating the hash if it is less than 10 rounds.

Testing Details

1. Booted up Flowise locally and signed up (using 5 salt rounds)
2. Made code updates to use 10 rounds, but made a temporary change to the code to throw an exception after the check (if (hashNeedsUpgrade(user.credential!, minRounds))) confirming that the check worked and determined there were insufficient salt rounds
3. Removes the exception from the code, login succeeded and so did subsequent logins

[gemini-code-assist]

Summary of Changes

Hello @christopherholland-workday, I'm Gemini Code Assist¹! I'm currently reviewing this pull request and will post my feedback shortly. In the meantime, here's a summary to help you and other reviewers quickly get up to speed!

This pull request significantly enhances the security posture of user authentication by upgrading the password hashing strategy. It increases the computational cost for new password hashes and introduces a seamless, on-login upgrade process for older, less secure hashes. This proactive approach ensures that all user credentials eventually meet a higher standard of cryptographic strength, making the system more resilient against brute-force and dictionary attacks.

Highlights

• Increased Salt Rounds for New Passwords: The default number of salt rounds used for hashing new passwords has been increased from 5 to 10, aligning with OWASP recommendations for enhanced security.
• Automatic Password Hash Upgrade: A new mechanism has been implemented to automatically detect if an existing user's password hash was created with fewer than 10 salt rounds. Upon successful login, if the hash is deemed weaker, it will be re-hashed with the current minimum of 10 rounds and saved back to the database.
• New Encryption Utility Functions: Two new utility functions, getBcryptRoundsFromHash and hashNeedsUpgrade, have been added to encryption.util.ts to facilitate the inspection and upgrade of password hashes.

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[gemini-code-assist]

Code Review

This pull request is a great security improvement. It increases the bcrypt salt rounds to the recommended value of 10 and implements a seamless upgrade path for existing users' passwords upon login. The changes are well-structured, introducing utility functions for checking and upgrading hashes. I have a few suggestions to reduce code duplication and improve maintainability, primarily around centralizing the logic for determining salt rounds and using the new getHash utility consistently.

[gemini-code-assist]

This manual password hashing logic is a duplicate of what the getHash function in encryption.util.ts provides. To improve maintainability and ensure hashing is done consistently across the application, you should use the getHash function here.

Suggested change

	const salt = bcrypt.genSaltSync(parseInt(process.env.PASSWORD_SALT_HASH_ROUNDS || '10'))
	// @ts-ignore
	const hash = bcrypt.hashSync(data.user.password, salt)
	// Replaced manual hashing with a call to the centralized getHash function.
	// @ts-ignore
	const hash = getHash(data.user.password);

[gemini-code-assist]

The logic to parse the number of salt rounds from environment variables is duplicated here and in other parts of the codebase (e.g., encryption.util.ts). To ensure consistency and improve maintainability, this should be centralized into a single helper function, for example in encryption.util.ts.

[gemini-code-assist]

The logic to parse the number of salt rounds from environment variables (including the default value of '10') is duplicated in account.service.ts. To centralize this logic and improve maintainability, consider creating a new helper function in this file, like getSaltRounds(), and use it in all relevant places.