HTTP Developer’s Handbook

Always Protect Sensitive Data

There have been numerous stories in the past of databases compromised in which sensitive data such as credit card numbers and passwords were stored unprotected. This type of practice is unacceptable, especially now that the repercussions are well known.

It is often unnecessary that data be recoverable. In these cases, following with the principle of least privilege, you should make this data unrecoverable. The most common example of this technique is a password challenge. You are generally not concerned with a user’s password, but rather whether it was valid. By using a message-digest algorithm such as MD5, you can achieve this result without recovering the original password. When you initially store the user’s ...