All of the interesting technological, artistic or just plain fun subjects I'd investigate if I had an infinite number of lifetimes. In other words, a dumping ground...

Wednesday, 28 May 2008

Authentication, passwords, hashing and salts for web applications

Hardened stateless session cookies

May 16th, 2008 at 12:40 UTC by Steven J. Murdoch

The root cause behind the last-but-one Wordpress cookie debacle was that the authors invented their own password hashing and cookie generation scheme. This is generally a bad idea, since it's hard even for experts to get these right. Instead, whenever possible, a well-studied proposal should be chosen. It is for this reason that I suggested the phpass library for password hashing, and the Fu et al. stateless session cookie proposal.


Portable PHP password hashing framework

Please note that password hashing is often wrongly referred to as "password encryption". Hashing is a more appropriate term since encryption is something that is supposed to be easily reversible.

This is a portable public domain password hashing framework for use in PHP applications. It is meant to work with PHP 3 and above, and it has actually been tested with at least PHP 3.0.18, 4.3.x, 4.4.x, 5.0.x, 5.1.x, and 5.2.x so far.


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