Question

I am implementing a validation scheme and am using the bcrypt-ruby gem.

require 'bcrypt'

    class User < ActiveRecord::Base

      include BCrypt

      attr_accessor :password

      attr_accessible :name, :email, :password, :password_confirmation

      validates :password, :presence => true, :on => :create,
                           :confirmation => true,
                           :length => {:within => 6..12}

     before_save :encrypt_password

      def has_password?(submitted_password)
      self.encrypted_password == submitted_password # this calls a method in bcrypt    

    # File lib/bcrypt.rb, line 171
    #     def ==(secret)
    #       super(BCrypt::Engine.hash_secret(secret, @salt))
    #     end

      end

    private

      def encrypt_password

           self.encrypted_password = Password.create(password, :cost => 5)  
       end
    end

Now in the console I create a new user

>> user = User.create!(:name => "test", :email => "[e-mail]", :password => "foobar", :password_confirmation => "foobar")

=> #<User id: 1, name: "test", email: "[e-mail]", created_at: "2011-06-23 05:00:00", updated_at: "2011-06-23 05:00:00", encrypted_password: "$2a$10$I7Wy8NDMeVcNgOsE3J/ZyubiNAESyxA7Z49H4p1x5xxH...">

And if I check if the password is valid I do the following:

>> user.has_password?("foobar")
=> true

but if I get the user from the database it fails:

user = User.find(1)
user.has_password?("foobar")
=> false

Why does that happen and how can I implement bcrypt to make this work?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

My guess would be that since encrypted_password is stored in the database as a string and not a BCrypt::Password, you’re not calling into BCrypt’s ==, but rather String’s ==. You have to instantiate an instance of the Password around the string hash value. That would be where I’d look.