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copied!<p>Your question seems to imply that the encrypted password is somehow accessible from the network.</p> <p>That should not happen - either use <code>.htaccess</code> or equivalent to restrict access to that file, or simply store it outside your document root. That way a potential attacker won't have anything to attempt to decrypt even if they do know the encryption algorithm.</p> <p>That said, there is a large number of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function" rel="nofollow">crytpographic hashing algorithms</a>, that will encrypt your password to a form that is highly improbable (but not impossible) to be reversed, even if an attacker does acquire your password file/text.</p> <p>The Wikipedia article above has a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function#Cryptographic_hash_algorithms" rel="nofollow">nice list</a> with various algorithms and the current estimates about the difficulty of reversing an encrypted password for each case.</p> <p>Most modern environments already have support for the most potent of these algorithms. For PHP:</p> <p><a href="http://php.net/manual/en/function.sha1.php" rel="nofollow">http://php.net/manual/en/function.sha1.php</a></p> <p><a href="http://php.net/manual/en/function.hash.php" rel="nofollow">http://php.net/manual/en/function.hash.php</a></p> <p>The second one provides some variety to choose from...</p> <p>EDIT:</p> <p>Keep in mind that even the best hashing algorithm won't help very much if your chosen password is <code>johnycash</code> or something similarly easy to guess using a brute force dictionary attack.</p> <p>Quite often, the weakest link of a system lies in the people that use it...</p>

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