Configuring secure passwords

You might recall from the security audit in Chapter 1, Anatomy of an Unsafe Application, that the security of passwords stored in cleartext was a top priority of the auditors. In fact, in any secured system, password security is a critical aspect of trust and authoritativeness of an authenticated principal. Designers of a fully secured system must ensure that passwords are stored in a way in which malicious users would have an impractically difficult time compromising them.

The following general rules should be applied to passwords stored in a database:

• Passwords must not be stored in cleartext (plaintext)
• Passwords supplied by the user must be compared to the recorded passwords in the database
• A user's password should not be supplied to the user upon demand (even if the user forgets it)

For the purposes of most applications, the best fit for...