PHP Log-in Form: SQL database Password

Question

I am creating a log-in website where users use username and password to log-in and write their dairy. I have created a SQL database named 'diary' which can be accessed using the following on my localhost.

$dbhost = 'localhost:3306';
$dbuname = 'diary';
$dbpass = 'guest123';

Inside the database diary I created a table which stores 3 information of type VARCHAR i.e.

• user_id
• password (I just used plain-text for tutorial purpose)
• name

In the above example I provided the password and the name of the database in the following code, to have access to the database.

$conn = mysqli_connect($dbhost, $dbuname, $dbpass);

My question is, it is safe to hard-code the password of the database (eg. password of database diary)? Considering an online application, if a hacker can hack into the server, then he will have full access to the database, because I have hard-coded the password in my program.

What I have assumed in the above example is that I have one database diary that stores all the users log-in information.

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Another alternative is that every user has their own database which is created when they sign-up. However, I believe that this option is not an ideal because all the databases of individual users are dis-joint and it may be difficult to manage.

I just need some explanations of this issues as I am new to this part, especially SQL. Say I have 1 million users, Which approach is better way to implement this example?

Answer 1

Your questions is very interesting and I can separate it in three:

1. How to store passwords in Database
2. Does it ok to have different databases

3. How to hide the database password in the files

   1. For the first question, you should hashing functions (they can't be restored back programmatically). For php is best to use password_hash() and password_verify() and this is pretty easy for work.

   2. You can't do it, this is not a property way. What will happens when you have more then 1M users? :)

   3. If they have access to the server they can work with the database, so you can't stop them, but if you want to hide them please read more about RSA and AES file encryption. Also you can use some functions as hex2bin and bin2hex, but this is not really hidden. The another way is to move these files some kind of permission protected directory, but really it's much more difficult to be done.

Answer 2

DO NOT store passwords in plain-text, you should use PHP's inbuilt function to hash the passwords:

// persist this hash in the db
var $hash = password_hash($plainPassword)

// verify later
if (!password_verify($givenPass, $hash)) {
  // provided password is incorrect, handle here
}

https://php.net/manual/en/function.password-hash.php https://php.net/manual/en/function.password-verify.php