Building Microservices with Go

Password hashing

A hash is one-way cryptography: you take a series of letters and numbers and, by running them through the hashing algorithm, you get a sequence, which while reproducible with the same original input, cannot be reversed mathematically. So why would you use a hash instead of just encrypting the data? Firstly, hashes do not require any keys, and therefore they are not vulnerable to the loss of private keys, and they are perfect for storing data that does not need to be reversed. Consider passwords: your system never needs to know what the user's password is, and it only needs to know that the value passed to you by the user matches the stored value. Hashing a password is the perfect approach to security: you hash the input from ...