The majority of the Coding Horror: Speed Hashing post talks about speed based on MD5. [...] If you are still using MD5 to hash passwords (or worse, aren't hashing passwords at all) then please stop and go use bcrypt. For those using PHP phpass is a great option.

He talks about the crypt method, how its encryption method and "cost" value effects the speed and how difficult it would be to generate all possible hashes for a password (hint: crypt with a cost of 13 is worlds better than md5).

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.8. This release fixes two issues introduced in the PHP 5.3.7 release: Fixed bug #55439 (crypt() returns only the salt for MD5), reverted a change in timeout handling restoring PHP 5.3.6 behavior, which caused mysqlnd SSL connections to hang (Bug #55283). All PHP users should note that the PHP 5.2 series is NOT supported anymore. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.3.8.

As always you can download this latest release from the downloads page (Windows binaries here). This upgrade is highly recommended if you were running 5.3.7.

Due to unfortunate issues with 5.3.7 (see bug#55439) users should wait with upgrading until 5.3.8 will be released (expected in few days).

The issue causes the crypt() function to only return the (MD5-only) salt it was given instead of the correctly hashed string. If you need to replace this immediately, you can pull the latest from the snaps site (or binaries for Windows). Keep an eye out for PHP 5.3.8 in the near future.

The easy and common solution for this particular problem is to use an one-way hash function, such as md5 and sha1, which takes the password and encrypts it. Unfortunately, this method is not as strong as you may think. [...] We can protect our password from rainbow tables and similar attacks by using salts.

He talks about storing passwords in a database (never as plain text!) and what rainbow tables are and how they can make it simple for a user to break a poorly hashed value. He shows how to use the crypt function together with the sha512 hashing tool to make a salt.

From time to time, servers and databases are stolen or compromised. With this in mind, it is important to ensure that some crucial user data, such as passwords, can not be recovered. Today, we are going to learn the basics behind hashing and what it takes to protect passwords in your web applications.

The article is a simple introduction to the topic and doesn't claim that it will protect you 100% but it's good to get the ball rolling. They talk about md5 hashing and the crypt method. He also outlines a few problems that surround hashing - hash collisions, attackers using "rainbow tables" and how quickly the average computer can run through hashes (an average 8 character password could be broken in around 60 hours). For each, he includes a few things you can do in your code to help prevent them from happening.

While GnuPG works very well as a standalone tool, it also plays very well with PHP. This integration is possible due to PHP's ext/gnupg extension, which provides a flexible and powerful API to access GnuPG functions for encryption, decryption, message signing and verification, and key maintenance. And your mission (should you choose to accept it) will be to accompany me over the next few pages, while I give you a crash course in this API, showing you how easy it is to integrate these functions into your next PHP application.

The tutorial walks you through some of the basic concepts behind the "lock and key" GnuPG implements and how to get the extension installed so you can follow along. His examples range from a basic encryption of a string out to a full encrypt/decrypt example, how to sign information with a key and even a method for sending an encrypted message.

Yes, my OpenID 2.0 PHP5 Consumer has finally been proposed to PEAR. This brings the OpenID fanaticism on PEAR to four packages: OpenID_Consumer, Services_Yadis, Crypt_HMAC2, Crypt_DiffieHellman.

He'll be working to get the code "further up to par" including Nonce validation, more consistent error reporting and other operation modes (like check_immediate). He's also included a screencast in the post for those not familiar with OpenID to get their first dose.

The most important addition is that a mutex is placed around the call to the system's crypt() function to ensure thread safety. This mutex is necessary to close a bunch of possible attacks on the libc crypt() function on multi threaded systems.

He goes on to explain why it's so important - correcting a possible race condition between competing threads looking to use the crypt() function at the same time. They use the same shared memory space and, because of this, can return possible invalid data. The patch changes this behavior and replaces it with a blowfish implementation to make things more thread-safe.

In this increasingly virtual online world, you have to be careful to protect your data. Learn the basics of encoding and encrypting important bits of information, such as passwords, credit card numbers, and even entire messages. Get an overview of what it means to encrypt and decrypt information, as well as some practical examples involving passwords and other data, using PHP's built-in functionality.

They start off where any good encryption article should - with a primer in cyrptography. You can't understand the advanced without a good grasp on the basic. Using this knowledge, they start to work up their form, a simple username and password validation system.

They provide all of the code you'll need to build the form, and even intorduce you to the crypt() function. A bad use of this functionality is also illustrated. Of course, encryption is only half the fun, so they also include an example of decrypting the same information.