Good security practice and passwords?

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A bit of a general question.
In my website I have a login feature. User details are stored in a MYSQL database and interacted with PHP. Passwords are stored as a salted md5 hash sum. (All the norm there)

Normally I would use sessions to track logins however my hosting company didn't like them for some reason. But I had a quick fix.

When you login it creates a cookie of the username and password you logged in with + an expirey time of an hour. Every time a page loads it checks these details against the database. I can't see any floors other than intercepting packets etc. Is this a viable solution to my problem, or is it a bit risky regarding security?

Code snippets seem irrelevant, but I can provide. Thank You for any tips with this matter.

Posted 12-Jul-11 11:26am

Thomas.D Williams

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-12T11:50:00

Solution 1

No. What is absolutely unsafe is MD5. It was found to be broken. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5[^].

Switch to the cryptographic hash function (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function[^]) from the SHA family. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA2[^].

Don't rely on "safe place", this is not enough. Change the cryptographic hash function.

—SA

Posted 12-Jul-11 11:50am

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov

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Thomas.D Williams 13-Jul-11 4:37am

Thank you for your response. Going to have to make some changes to the system. Teaches me a lesson for relying on such 'presumed safe' method

( P.S If you remember the Neural Network I was making thats been put on hold for a commercial project).

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 13-Jul-11 10:37am

You're welcome.
Good luck, call again.
--SA