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Showing posts from July, 2012

Password hashing in Java

I was recently asked to provide db based user authentication for a relatively application, which user primarily ldap user authentication. This nearly backdoor-looking feature is only for a handful of users which made it ideal for experimentation. I could have stored user passwords as plain-text and nobody else would ever know, but the one person that would know matters the most, me. Almost every application uses passwords for user autentization. Although in complex environment, you don't usually want users to have different password for every application, there are situations that needs different approach. And in those times, security shouldn't be taken lightly. Whether you are writing small intranet application, or full scale internet application, you should always protect your user's accounts, because a lot of studies suggest that majority of users use the same password for everything, so for these users, when one application falls, they all fall. That is the re