How to Encrypt Your Data With the PHP Function Hash
If your website handles passwords, you need to make sure those passwords are safe. Password hacks can be devastating and can have a long-term negative impact on traffic, revenue, and your reputation. The good news is that protecting your site from hackers is not hard to do. By hashing your passwords, you can ensure that any unauthorized attempt to access your site will be ineffective and will result in nothing more than an annoyance for the hacker.
This article covers various methods of encrypting data through the use of multiple hash functions of PHP. This is a very useful technique to protect your data from hacker attacks and will also prevent any changes in the encrypted data.
PHP supports a variety of hashing algorithms with the crypt() function. You can use different algorithms by specifying them in the hash_algorithm argument. There is a large list of available algorithms and the most important ones are md5, sha256, and SHA-1.
The crypt() function allows you to set a salt for the hash, which is an extra piece of information that is added to the original data to produce the hash. This helps to secure the hash against a dictionary attack. The salt should contain only symbols and numbers that are not easily guessed.
In addition to using a salt, you can add additional security by adding a random value to the hash. You can do this by passing a random number to the hash_algorithm argument. If you want to use the bcrypt algorithm with crypt(), you can also specify a cost parameter. The higher the cost, the more processing power is required to generate a hash.