Question

All,

I am using the following PHP function to salt & hash user passwords for a web app:

function stringHashing($password,$salt){
 $hashedString=$password.$salt;
 for ($i=0; $i<50; $i++){
  $hashedString=hash('sha512',$password.$hashedString.$salt);
  }
 return $hashedString;
}  

What is the best way to store the resulting string in MySQL? I suppose it is a fixed CHAR field? How should I go about calculating the right length?

Thanks,

JDelage

Answer 1

Well, SHA512 will always return a 512 bit hash, the two-argument hash() method returns this as hex digits, so that’s 512 bits / 8 bits per byte * 2 hex digits per byte = 128 hex digits

A CHAR(128) should be what you need