Password security is a critical matter when it comes to protecting the interests of application users and their data for a satisfactory user experience. With the advancement in technology, now more than ever, application developers need to be able to implement reliable mechanisms to prevent passwords from being stolen. Java Password and Authentication Security provides a practical approach to implement these reliable mechanisms with the possibility to make password authentication stronger as technology makes it easier to break them. Java Password and Authentication Security is a practical, hands-on guide covering a number of clear, step-by-step exercises and code examples that will help you to implement strong password authentication solutions for your project in no time. This book starts off with the most basic and well known hashing technique to quickly get an application developer started with implementing a standard password protection mechanism. Furthermore, it covers the stronger SHA (standard hashing algorithm) family in detail and brings up a technique to improve the hash security with a technique called “salting”. You will also learn how to use these hashes, and more importantly, when to use each technique. You will learn that not every hash algorithm is good in every situation, and how to deal with password recovery, password authentication, and timing attacks.