Using a Salt or a Pepper?

Using a pepper is the same thing as using a salt, but it's stored differently. A hacker can't reverse engineer some of the salts and hash them to get at the pepper. If you use vault, for example, maybe they have it in vault so that it's completely separate from your data base where users are. But if a hacker got that, he hopefully doesn't also have the pepper from the vault. It does add another layer of protection against security breaches.