What I don't understand (truly--I'm a curious neophyte here) is why a random number would be better than salting with, say, their username.
If the assumption is that the random number is known, per both guidelines that only the user-given secret can be assumed secret and that the article says it could conceivably be stored plaintext, isn't it effectively equivalent to just another username?
If two websites use this scheme and they both get hacked and a user has an account on both with the same username/password the attacker has to do half as much work. Another reason is an attacker can compute a rainbow table prior to getting access to the hashed passwords. This would reduce the amount of time the owners of the site would have to respond in the event of a breach. Finally, it's really easy and cheap to generate a random salt.
You can, but it prevents you from allowing changing the username (which might be fine, but why tie yourself?) and it provides less entropy - a username + password can be small enough to fit in a rainbow table, while a random salt can have whatever size you want.
Excellent explanation. I'll further this by adding that, in my use of the excellent PBKDF2.NET library, I generate a salt with the same number of bits that the hashing algorithm generates (e.g., 256-bit salt for SHA256). I can't remember where I read that this was a good practice, though. :(
If the assumption is that the random number is known, per both guidelines that only the user-given secret can be assumed secret and that the article says it could conceivably be stored plaintext, isn't it effectively equivalent to just another username?