info: To determine the technical writer assigned to the Stage/Group associated with this page, see https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/ux/technical-writing/#assignments
GitLab uses the [Devise](https://github.com/heartcombo/devise) authentication library, which handles the hashing of user passwords. Password hashes are created with the following attributes:
- **Hashing**: the [bcrypt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt) hashing function is used to generate the hash of the provided password. This is a strong, industry-standard cryptographic hashing function.
- **Stretching**: Password hashes are [stretched](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_stretching) to harden against brute-force attacks. GitLab uses a stretching factor of 10 by default.
- **Salting**: A [cryptographic salt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography)) is added to each password to harden against pre-computed hash and dictionary attacks. Each salt is randomly generated for each password, so that no two passwords share a salt, to further increase security.
