Should You Cleanse Passwords Before Hashing?

User Password Security: The Case Against Pre-Hashing Cleansing

Protecting user passwords is paramount. While it's common practice to sanitize user input in PHP, pre-hashing password cleansing is unnecessary and potentially harmful.

Why Skip Password Cleansing?

• Redundant Code: Adding cleansing steps increases code complexity without providing any real benefit.
• No Security Gain: Hashed passwords are immune to SQL injection vulnerabilities because they're converted to hashes before database storage.
• Hashes Accept All Characters: Modern hashing algorithms like bcrypt readily handle any character within a password string, including spaces and special characters.

Trimming: A Source of Verification Problems

Even seemingly harmless actions like trimming whitespace can create verification problems. If cleansing is implemented, it must be consistently applied during both password storage and verification, needlessly complicating the process.

Sanitization's Impact on Password Hashes

Applying various sanitization techniques (e.g., trim, htmlentities, htmlspecialchars, addslashes, strip_tags) can alter password content, leading to verification failures.

In Summary:

Pre-hashing password cleansing is unnecessary, inefficient, and can introduce vulnerabilities. The strength of password security lies solely in the hashing algorithm itself, rendering cleansing redundant. Omitting this step simplifies your code and strengthens your application's security.

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