Hashing keeps your users info secure.
Credit: Flickr user FutUndBeidl
We’ve been working on this series for a while now (as you can gather from the series links below), and as such have covered a number of different areas:
However, there are a couple of things we wanted to mention before we wrap everything up.
What on earth is a salt? And why are you using the word as if it’s a definite article instead of the normal “pass the salt, please”?
A salt is a randomly generated sequence of letters and numbers, which are coupled with another input (in this case the user’s password) and entered into a one-way formula (i.e. a hash is taken of the entire coupling). The result of this one-way formula is then stored in the database, in place of the password (and alongside the salt). This combination extends the users’ password to such a length that an effective rainbow table would need to be gigantic. More →
