Storing Hashed User Passwords in the Database

Problem

The database table defined in Recipe 15.8 stores users passwords as plain text. This is a bad idea: if someone compromises the database, she will have all of your users passwords. Its best to store a secure hash of the password instead. That way, you don have the password (so no one can steal it), but you can verify that a user knows his password.

Solution

Recreate the users table from Recipe 15.8 so that instead of a password field, it has a hashed_password field. Heres some MySQL code to do that:

use mywebapp_development; DROP TABLE IF EXISTS users; CREATE TABLE users ( id INT(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, username VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, hashed_password VARCHAR(40) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (id) );

Open the file app/models/user.rb created in Recipe 15.8, and edit it to look like this:

require sha1 class User < ActiveRecord::Base attr_accessor :password attr_protected :hashed_password validates_uniqueness_of :username validates_confirmation_of : password, :if => lambda { |user| user.new_record? or not user.password.blank? } validates_length_of :password, :within => 5..40, :if => lambda { |user| user.new_record? or not user.password.blank? } def self.hashed(str) SHA1.new(str).to_s end # If a user matching the credentials is found, returns the User object. # If no matching user is found, returns nil. def self.authenticate(user_info) user = find_by_username(user_info[:username]) if user && user.hashed_password == hashed(user_info[:password]) return user end end private before_save :update_password # Updates the hashed_password if a plain password was provided. def update_password if not password.blank? self.hashed_password = self.class.hashed(password) end end end

Once you do this, your application will work as before (though youll have to convert any preexisting user accounts to the new password format). You don need to modify any of the controller or view code, because the User.authenticate method works the same way it did before. This is one of the benefits of separating business logic from presentation logic.

Discussion

There are now three pieces to our user model. The first is the enhanced validation code. The user model now:

When a new user is created, or when the password is changed, User ensures:

The second section of code defines User class methods as before. We add one new class-level method, hashed, which performs the hashing function on a plaintext password. If we want to change hashing mechanisms in the future, we only have to change this method (and migrate any existing passwords).

The third piece of code in the model is a private instance method, update_password, which synchronizes the plaintext password attribute with the hashed version in the database. The call to before_save sets up this method to be called before a User object is saved to the database. This way you can change a users password by setting password to its plaintext value, instead of doing the hash yourself.

See Also

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