How does hashing with salt contribute to data security?

Hashing with salt is a crucial practice in securing sensitive data, especially passwords, by adding a unique value (the salt) to the input data before it is hashed. This process significantly enhances security by providing multiple layers of protection against specific attack methods.

The primary benefit of incorporating salt into hashing is its effectiveness against dictionary and rainbow table attacks. In these types of attacks, hackers utilize precomputed tables containing hashes of common passwords to quickly determine the original input. By adding a unique salt for each password before hashing, even if two users have the same password, the resulting hashes will be different. This randomness disrupts the usefulness of precomputed tables, requiring attackers to generate new hash tables for each unique salt, making it computationally intensive and time-consuming.

Other choices like preventing access to data or making data unidentifiable do not accurately describe the function of hashing with salt. While salting adds complexity to the process, it does not inherently speed up data retrieval, as the focus is on security instead of performance. Thus, the correct answer focuses on the enhanced protection against specific types of threats that salted hashes effectively mitigate.