Let’s say you’re building a big new web app at your institution. One of the parts of this application will be storing usernames and passwords. There are a ton of ways to do this, but today I want to share with you one way that I do things, in the hopes of making my logins as secure as possible. For our examples today, we’ll be using PHP.<\/p>\n
Before I get going too far, I should mention that when I say storing passwords, what we’re really doing is storing a hash<\/a> of the user’s password. When we authenticate a user, we run the password they supply through whatever algorithm we’re using to encrypt and hash their input and we compare the result to what we’re storing in our database.<\/p>\n