Question

I have a database full of users who I generated passwords for using the code:

UPDATE users SET password = SUBSTRING(MD5(RAND()) FROM 1 FOR 8)

I made another table with just the users email / passwords for quick reference

I now want to encrypt the passwords on the main user table. I attempted this with the following code but it doesn’t work. What’s wrong with it?

$query = "SELECT * FROM usersreference";
$result = mysql_query($query);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
    $password = $row['password'];
    $email = $row['email'];
    $encrypted_password = md5($password);
}

$query = 'UPDATE users SET password = "' . $encrypted_password . '" WHERE email = "' . $email . '"';
$result = mysql_query($query);

if (mysql_affected_rows() == 1) {
    header('Location: index.php?page=Admin');
} else {
    die("there was a problem");
}
mysql_close();

Answer 1

You can encrypt all passwords using SQL:

UPDATE users SET `password` = MD5(`password`)

Btw, the SQL query in your PHP code doesn’t work because password is a reserved word in MySQL so you need to backtick-quote it.