Hash Passwords With PHP 5.5

Hash Passwords With PHP 5.5

Every PHP developer would have to build an application that relies on a user login.

It means that the user of the website having a Username and Password which is stored in the database so they can login into your website.

Therefore it's important that passwords stored in the database should be hashed before. A password hash is a one way encryption of a string, so you won't be able to decrypt this to find out what the password is.

You should never store a password in the database without hashing it first, if a third party gets access to your database they will be able to get hold of all the password's or your users.

It is important that you protect your users by hashing the passwords.

Hashed is similar to encryption in the sense that it turns your password into a long string of letters and numbers to keep it hidden. However, unlike encryption, hashing is a one way street: If you have the hash, you can't run the algorithm backwards to get the original password. This means a hacker would have to obtain the hashes and then try a number of different password combinations to see which ones worked.

However, there is a downside to this method. While a hacker can't decode a hash back to the original password, they can try many different passwords until one matches the hash they have. Computers can do this very fast, and with the help of something called rainbow tables—which is essentially a list of trillions of different hashes and their matching passwords—they can just look up the hash to see if it's already been discovered. Try typinge38ad214943daad1d64c102faec29de4afe9da3d into Google. You'll quickly find that it's the SHA-1 hash for "password1". For more information on how rainbow tables work, check out this article by coding guru Jeff Atwood on the subject.

Ways Of Hashing Passwords

A while ago it was common to find people hashing passwords by using these functions.

But these functions are not recommended to use when you are hashing passwords...

This is because of the way these functions work, you can easily create a script to use brute force on this function to return a string that matches another md5() string.

These functions are fine to use for other hashing but it is not recommended for passwords.

Instead of using these function you should be using crypt() or the hash() function, the complexity of these functions means that they are slower to run than the other md5()and sha1() functions. This means that the output from a brute force attack will take much longer to run than using the md5() function.

Another benefit of using the crypt() function is that you can pass a second parameter of a salt. A salt is an encrypted string that is added to the password during hashing, it is a way of adding additional data to the string which will make the hash harder to crack.

Password Hashing Using PHP version 5.5

In PHP version 5.5 password hashing functions were introduced into the core giving you access to use 4 functions to use when hashing passwords and verifying a password.

  • password_get_info — Returns information about the given hash
  • password_hash — Creates a password hash
  • password_needs_rehash — Checks if the given hash matches the given options
  • password_verify — Verifies that a password matches a hash

The two important functions to understand are the password_hash() and thepassword_verify().

Password_hash Function

The password_hash function will create the hashed password from a string, It takes 3 parameters, the first is the string to hash, second is the algorithm you want to use to hash the password and the third are additional options like salt to pass into the function.

$options = [

'cost' => 11,

'salt' => mcrypt_create_iv(22, MCRYPT_DEV_URANDOM), 

];  

$hashed_password = password_hash( $string, PASSWORD_DEFAULT, $options );

The default hashing algorithm password_hash uses is currently bcrypt, note that this could change in the future as newer encryption algorithms are added into PHP.

The third parameter allows you to add a salt to the password, if one is not provided then PHP will generate a random salt to use for each password generated. It is actually recommended to not generate a salt for this function but allow PHP to generate the salt for you.

Password Hash

Password_verify Function

This function is used to make sure that the string password and the string hashed password match and will return a boolean TRUE if the passwords match.

$matched = password_verify( $password, $hashed_password );

Using just these two function you can now easily create a user login section which generates secure passwords you can store in the database and match when the user logins in.

Password Verify

 

 

 

 

original spurce: www.paulund.co.uk

 
by Janeth Kent Date: 28-08-2013 php hash password script libraries coding developers programming web development hits : 11129  
 
Janeth Kent

Janeth Kent

Licenciada en Bellas Artes y programadora por pasión. Cuando tengo un rato retoco fotos, edito vídeos y diseño cosas. El resto del tiempo escribo en MA-NO WEB DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT.

 
 
 

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