MySQL password field and PHP

[sparrowhawk]

A question for the other PHP/MySQL'ers out there. At the moment, passwords in MU are held in a plain text field. So somebody could access them relatively easily I suppose/fear.

Ideally, I'd like to encrypt the password so that neither a hacker nor myself for that matter can look at the value in the database and see what it is.

The MySQL function PASSWORD() does a one-way hash encryption, and this is where I am stuck. How do I handle the comparison of the encrypted value with the plain text value passed in by the user? Is another way better than PASSWORD() ?

I know zipadeedooda about encryption, so a Dummy's Guide type approach is best, I should think!

[Freiegeister]

Jean-Yves said:

A question for the other PHP/MySQL'ers out there. At the moment, passwords in MU are held in a plain text field. So somebody could access them relatively easily I suppose/fear.

Ideally, I'd like to encrypt the password so that neither a hacker nor myself for that matter can look at the value in the database and see what it is.

The MySQL function PASSWORD() does a one-way hash encryption, and this is where I am stuck. How do I handle the comparison of the encrypted value with the plain text value passed in by the user? Is another way better than PASSWORD() ?

I know zipadeedooda about encryption, so a Dummy's Guide type approach is best, I should think!

PASSWORD should be quite sufficient, as is any one way encryption scheme.

The usual technique (not sure if this is the case with PASSWORD) is to encrypt the plain text value using the encrypted password as the salt, and then compare the two values.

[sparrowhawk]

So in pseudo-code, assuming that:

"$plainPW" is the plain text password, and
"$encryptedPW" is the enrypted one (via PASSWORD() )

Would it be:


if encrypt($plainPW, $encryptedPW) = $encryptedPW then
OK
else
NOT OK


where the encrypt() function takes 2 parameters:
1 = plain text
2 = salt

Something like that?

[Freiegeister]

Jean-Yves said:

So in pseudo-code, assuming that:

"$plainPW" is the plain text password, and
"$encryptedPW" is the enrypted one (via PASSWORD() )

Would it be:


if encrypt($plainPW, $encryptedPW) = $encryptedPW then
OK
else
NOT OK


where the encrypt() function takes 2 parameters:
1 = plain text
2 = salt

Something like that?

Correct, and you could use the encrypt function without the salt to initially encrypt the password as well. Are the two functions compatible?