Any website that stores users login information has to store their passwords. One thing that provides an extra layer of security for your users information is to do one way encryption on their passwords. You could in theory store their passwords as plain text, but if someone were able to get in to your database, they would have instant access to every users account.

One way encryption allows the password to be store in a secure manner. In fact it is so secure that you cannot decrypt it to recover the encrypted data. In order to authenticate the user you actually have to encrypt submitted data and compare the results that way.

One of the most widely used ways to accomplish one way encryption is to create an MD5 hash of the password. Lucky for us, it is so incredibly easy to create an MD5 hash of a string. You simply use the function md5(). See the example below:

<?

$encrypted_password = md5("secret");

?>

The value of $encrypted_password is the secured password.