Yup - it's one way, so if you changed the salt you'd bust everything. The 
one-way-ness of it helps it be more secure as it is impossible (probably) to 
take an encrypted password and reverse it. When a user logs in Cake encrypts 
the value and compares it with the stored (encrypted) value to see if they 
match.

Jeremy Burns
Class Outfit

http://www.classoutfit.com

On 21 Oct 2011, at 17:36, Shukuboy wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I've been using Auth in a website under development and it seems to be
> working fine.   The only potential concern I have is that it uses the
> 'salt' for generating the encrypted password, and obviously to check
> it against provided password during login.
> 
> My question is :
> - Isn't md5 an irreversible ( technically)  algorithm ?
> - Is it really necessary to use the salt as part of the key that's
> used for encryption using md5 ?  Would that make it harder to crack
> the password ?
> - Is it a good practice to change the salt once in a while, or is it
> supposed to stay the same ? What happens if the salt in the website
> changes, would no user be able to login again ?
> 
> As you might have guess cryptography isn't really my thing, and hence
> appreciate if anyone could shed some light on these.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> -- 
> Our newest site for the community: CakePHP Video Tutorials 
> http://tv.cakephp.org 
> Check out the new CakePHP Questions site http://ask.cakephp.org and help 
> others with their CakePHP related questions.
> 
> 
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> [email protected] For more options, visit this group at 
> http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php

-- 
Our newest site for the community: CakePHP Video Tutorials 
http://tv.cakephp.org 
Check out the new CakePHP Questions site http://ask.cakephp.org and help others 
with their CakePHP related questions.


To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected] For more options, visit this group at 
http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php

Reply via email to