ctshryock

i'm currently working on a project for a client where i will be salting a password and storing the resulting hash. before this project i was only vaguely familiar with the concept and it turns out it's not hard. before the snippet of code, a basic preface: huh?

the idea is to hash together a randomly generated string with the users password, then store the resulting hash and the random string in the database, so you never actually store the users password. then the user then tries to login, you retrieve the hash and the salt, hash together the salt and the user supplied password, and compare the result to the stored hash. if they match, consider the user authenticated. for a much more detailed explanation, see here.

now some code:

//  get user password from $_POST[]
$newPassword = $_POST['new_password'];
//  generate a 32 character hash by hashing a random number between 1 - 10,000
$salt = md5(rand(1,10000));
//  hash the two together, store this result.
$new_password_hash = md5($salt.$newPassword)

now on login, retieve the users password hash and password salt, and compare the hash of the supplied password with the password salt to the stored hash:

$login_query = sprintf("SELECT  u.password_hash,
                                u.password_salt
                        FROM Users u
                        WHERE u.username = '%s' LIMIT 1", mysql_escape_string($_POST['username']));
$login_results = mysql_query($login_query, $db) or die(mysql_error());
$user_row = mysql_fetch_assoc($login_results);
if($user_row['password_hash'] == md5($user_row['password_salt'].$_POST['password'])) {
    //  user is authenticated
} else {
    //  user is not authenticated
}

i went to test in ie7 today and lost about an hour trying to figure out why the app basically crashed ie7 every time i logged in, seeing how nothing complex was happening between login and landing page.

after far too much debugging i found this was to blame:

$(window).resize(function(){
    adjustHeight();
});

or more specifically how ie7 handles the jQuery window.resize event. by handle i mean bastardize or something. fortunately i found this blog post with a jQuery plugin that makes ie7 behave.