Now that your users are able to sign up and log back in, you still have one more case to handle. If you get a match, then you check the hashed password that they typed in with the hashed password stored in your database. Once they submit their credentials through the login form, you'll search your database for the username they're signing in with. Handling returning usersĪfter your users' register, they're hopefully going to want to come back, and when they do, you need to verify that they are who they say they are. ✏️ To learn more about bcrypt, check out this excellent article: Hashing in Action - Understanding bcrypt. Whatever you do, make sure you don't try to roll out your own hashing algorithm. bcrypt is one popular library that can help you hash passwords. Most programming languages will have either built-in functionality for password hashing or an external library you can use. ℹ️ Make sure you use a secure and vetted hashing algorithm when implementing password hashing. That's why it's absolutely essential to hash your passwords. If someone gains access to your database, you don't want them to be able to swipe your entire users table and immediately have access to all user login credentials. The hashed password will be unrecognizable from the plaintext password, and it will be impossible to regenerate the plaintext password based on the hashed one. Hashing - Password hashing involves using a one-way cryptographic function that takes an input of any size and outputs a different string of a fixed size.īefore you store any passwords in your database, you should always hash them. However, there's one more step that must occur before you can do this: password hashing. Once you decide that the credentials should be stored, it's time to save them to your database. Once that's clear, you should again check that their password matches your minimum requirements, but this time you'll be confirming server side. Once the user chooses their username and password and clicks submit, then the real fun begins: storing the user's credentials.įirst, you have to check that the user doesn't already exist in the database. To enforce password strength, you should define a set of rules that a password must satisfy and then enforce these with form validation. If you make the sign-up process too tedious, you could be driving users away. Of course, you have to find a balance between these requirements and user experience. It's a good practice to enforce certain minimum requirements when asking users to create a new password. When it comes to password safety, the longer and more complex the password is, the better. For this reason, it's up to you as the developer to enforce this. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world. In an ideal world, the user would always pick a strong and unique password so that it's harder for an attacker to guess. When a user first signs up for your website, they're asked to choose a username and password to identify themselves. Let's take a look at what goes on behind the scenes during the authentication process. And unfortunately, there's a lot at stake if a user chooses weak credentials. Because this is such a common process now, it's become almost second-nature for some users to set up their accounts without much thought about the credentials they choose. Password authentication falls into the " what you know" category and is the most common form of authentication.Įvery time you've signed up for a website, you've likely been asked to create a username and password.
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