Symmetric Encryption (AES): Is saving the IV and Salt alongside the encrypted data safe and proper?

Storing the IV and Salt a long with the cipher text is proper and a best practice. Hard coding the salt is not useful, being random is important, hard coding the iterations is perfectly okay but is typically much higher than 300 (in fact at least 1000 and you typically go much higher if your machine/usage can handle it).

Yes, both the IV and salt are public values. What's more important is ensuring these are random values for each encryption operation.

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