Question

I’m pulling my hair out with this one. I am storing a hashed salted password and the related salt in a MySQL db. It is for a login script. Storing the data works fine, with the data being stored in CHAR(128) type on the db.

However, when I cannot successfully match the password string to the hashed login password from my login form. I’ve stripped everything down to basic and it still doesn’t match even though the output (echo or var_dump) looks identical.

Here is the register code snippet:

$_POST['dk_username'] = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['dk_username']);
$_POST['dk_password'] = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['dk_password']);
$username = stripslashes($_POST['dk_username']);
$password = stripslashes($_POST['dk_password']);

$salt = uniqid(mt_rand());
$newhash= $salt . $password;
$hashPass= hash('sha512', $newhash);

$email=$_POST['email'];

$sql="INSERT INTO users (uName,uPass2,uEmail,uSalt,uID)
VALUES ('$username','$hashPass','$email', '$salt', 'time()')";

mysql_query($sql) or die('Error, insert query failed');

Here is the login snippet:

$_POST['dk_username'] = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['dk_username']);
$_POST['dk_password'] = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['dk_password']);
$username = stripslashes($_POST['dk_username']);
$password = stripslashes($_POST['dk_password']);


$query = "SELECT uID, uPass2, uSalt, uName FROM users WHERE uName = '$username';"; 
$result = mysql_query($query); 
if(mysql_num_rows($result) < 1) //no such user exists 
{     echo 'Wrong username and/or password!'; 
} 
$userData = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC); 
$salt=$userData['uSalt'];
$newhash= $salt . $password;
$hashPass= hash('sha512', $newhash);
$tempData=strcmp($hashpass, $userData['uPass2']);
if(hashPass != $userData['uPass2']){
echo "password not correct:<br/>";
echo "db: " . var_dump($userData['uPass2']) . "<br />";
echo "in: " . var_dump($hashPass) . "<br />; 
echo $tempData . "<BR />";

}else{
echo "logged in";
}

Result for login:

password not correct:
string(128) "98f713244f3d97e8629222f8d37e3cad38c5c1e2fbf011c135723f36b7841ef29785b1866ac6dbab9cd044b12db8e4d16a4c68df1e3d7b8f4a27a8c3d4c9bca5" db: 
string(128) "98f713244f3d97e8629222f8d37e3cad38c5c1e2fbf011c135723f36b7841ef29785b1866ac6dbab9cd044b12db8e4d16a4c68df1e3d7b8f4a27a8c3d4c9bca5" in: 
-128

Answer 1

Your $ is missing here for $hashPass:

if(hashPass != $userData['uPass2']){

Currently it’s causing PHP to compare $userData['uPass2'] with a constant called hashPass (which PHP treats as the string 'hashPass' if the constant isn’t defined).

Setting error_reporting to include E_NOTICE would have caused PHP to spit a notice about the “constant”.