Question

I’m making a registration form, my only doubt is how to handle passwords (how to insert them into MySQL database). I don’t have the slightest idea on how to do it, what type of column must Passwords be, whether I must encrypt them somehow, etc. Could you provide a basic example with explanation so that I manage to do it?

Answer 1

You don’t want to store the password as-is in plaintext. You don’t even want to be able to know what the password is. Therefore, you store a hash of the password in your database. When the user wants to log in, you hash the password he’s trying to login with, then compare that to the hash in the database. Any serious password storage system furthermore salts the hash to prevent rainbow table attacks against the password (google that). Since this is a rather complex topic and you apparently have no experience with it at all, I recommend you use phpass to hash and salt your passwords without worrying about the implementation details. The phpass site also has some good introductory articles about the topic. Here’s another one that keeps it really simple.

As for the database, that’ll just be a normal VARCHAR field long enough to hold the hash.