Book Image

CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development

By : Adam Griffiths
Book Image

CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development

By: Adam Griffiths

Overview of this book

<p>CodeIgniter is an open source PHP framework with a small footprint and exceptional performance. It gives you a rich set of libraries for common tasks, with a simple interface to access them. There are several unexplored aspects of CodeIgniter that can help developers build applications more easily and quickly. In this book, you will learn the intricacies of the framework and explore some of its hidden gems.<br /><br />If you want to get the most out of CodeIgniter, this book is for you. It teaches you what you need to know to use CodeIgniter on a daily basis. You will create mini-applications that teach a specific technique and let you build on top of the base. <br /><br />This book will take you through developing applications with CodeIgniter. You will learn how to make your CodeIgniter application more secure than a default installation, how to build large-scale applications and web services, how to release code to the community, and much more. You will be able to authenticate users, validate forms, and also build libraries to complete different tasks and functions.<br /><br />The book starts off introducing the framework and how to install it on your web server or a local machine. You are introduced to the Model-View-Controller design pattern and how it will affect your development. Some important parts of the CodeIgniter Style Guide are included to keep CodeIgniter development as standardized as possible; this helps greatly when working as part of a team or taking on an old CodeIgniter project. You will quickly move on to how CodeIgniter URLs work and learn about CodeIgniter-specific files such as helpers and plugins. By the time you finish this book, you will be able to create a CodeIgniter application of any size with confidence, ease, and speed.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Storing passwords securely


User passwords are quite possibly the most important data that you store on your server, so you should ensure that you have taken reasonable steps to store these securely. We'll go over some of the different methods that you can use to store passwords in a secure manner.

Storing hashes

Storing a password as a hash is possibly the easiest way to store user passwords, and is used by many websites. Most developers would go straight to using an MD5 hash because it is the most well-known of the types of hashing available to developers. However, I would recommend you use sha1 hashes, because these are longer than MD5 and have proved harder to find the plaintext to than MD5 hashes.

Hashing a password using sha1

There are two ways to hash a password using this method. Firstly, if your PHP installation supports it (the chances are that it will) then you will be able to use the function sha1()—this is the easiest way to hash a password. The second way is done in exactly the...