Updated the bcrypt description as discussed in #1532

cheatsheets/Password_Storage_Cheat_Sheet.md

@@ -119,7 +119,7 @@ These configuration settings provide an equal level of defense. The only differe
 
 ### bcrypt
 
-The [bcrypt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/bcrypt) password hashing function should be the best choice for password storage in legacy systems or if PBKDF2 is required to achieve FIPS-140 compliance.
+The [bcrypt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/bcrypt) password hashing function **should only** be used for password storage in legacy systems where Argon2 and scrypt are not available.
 
 The work factor should be as large as verification server performance will allow, with a minimum of 10.
 
@@ -129,7 +129,20 @@ bcrypt has a maximum length input length of 72 bytes [for most implementations](
 
 #### Pre-Hashing Passwords with bcrypt
 
-An alternative approach is to pre-hash the user-supplied password with a fast algorithm such as SHA-256, and then to hash the resulting hash with bcrypt (i.e., `bcrypt(base64(hmac-sha256(data:$password, key:$pepper)), $salt, $cost)`). This is a dangerous (but common) practice that **should be avoided** due to [password shucking](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQD3qDYMyYQ) and other issues when [combining bcrypt with other hash functions](https://blog.ircmaxell.com/2015/03/security-issue-combining-bcrypt-with.html) (**Note:** "The Fix" in this blog post only protect you from null bytes; it does **NOT** protect you from password shucking!).
+An alternative approach is to pre-hash the user-supplied password with a fast algorithm such as SHA-2, HMAC, or BLAKE3 and then to hash the resulting hash value with bcrypt (i.e., `bcrypt(H($password)), $salt, $cost)`)..
+This can be **dangerous** because of null bytes in the hash output value and because of [password shucking](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQD3qDYMyYQ).
+
+The original bcrypt expects a null terminated password string, this means that the hash value will only be used to the first null byte in the hash value. (`bcrypt(H($password)), $salt, $cost) == bcrypt("", $salt, $cost)` if `H($password)[0] == 0`)
+This increases the chance of finding a collision when [combining bcrypt with other hash functions](https://blog.ircmaxell.com/2015/03/security-issue-combining-bcrypt-with.html) and can be avoided by encoding the hash value to printable string with something like base64.
+base64 can increases the length of the hash value above 72 characters and so there is a bit of truncation for large hash values from hashes like SHA-512, this is [negligible](https://soatok.blog/2024/11/27/beyond-bcrypt/).
+
+Password shucking uses the fact, that it is easy to check if  `bcrypt(base64(H($password))), $salt, $cost) == bcrypt(base64($leaked_hash), $salt, $cost)`.
+If the inner hash function `H` is used with the same password somewhere else and known to an attacker cracking the password can be reduced to breaking the hash function `H`.
+Just using pure SHA-512, ( i.e. `bcrypt(base64(sha512($password))), $salt, $cost)`) is a **dangerous practice** and is as secure as just using pure SHA-512.
+Password shucking only works if a leaked hash is known to the attacker, either through a breach database or rainbow tables.
+To mitigate password shucking a [pepper](#peppering) can be used.
+
+To summarize if bcrypt has to be used and the password should to be pre-hashed you should do `bcrypt(base64(hmac-sha384(data:$password, key:$pepper)), $salt, $cost)` and store the pepper not in the database.
 
 ### PBKDF2