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[jimbo75]

I have installed the PHP server that is given to everyone by surpass and I want to be able to use the passwords from the accounts on the Forum to be useable on my upload scripts.... But, the passwords are stored as hashes and I am not sure as to how I would go about decoding the hashes to verify that they entered a password correctly for the uploads. Any help will be greatly appretiated. TIA.

-David

[AlexH]

The way most forums hash the passwords is to use the md5() method, and that is almost impossible to decrypt. So, to check it, you can use this:

if ( md5($_POST['password']) == $row['password'] ) { ...code here... }

$_POST['password'] being the password that the user has input to upload, and $row['password'] being the password stored in your forums database.

Hope that helps.

[jimbo75]

At that point the user has to input a hash as a password because the password I am comparing it to is a hash right? Do you think it would be possible to change the script in the php forum so that when the user submits his/her information, it sends the user name and password to a seperate database in plain text where it can be accessed from there as well?

[AlexH]

You your users don't have to input the hash, that's what md5() does. It converts any string into an md5 hash.

Originally posted by PHP Website

string md5 ( string str [, bool raw_output])

Calculates the MD5 hash of str using the RSA Data Security, Inc. MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm, and returns that hash. The hash is a 32-character hexadecimal number. If the optional raw_output is set to TRUE, then the md5 digest is instead returned in raw binary format with a length of 16.

[patrickb]

It's like wbie said. You don't actually ever decrypt the password. There would be no point in doing the encryption in the first place if it were that easy.

You basically get the password from the user at upload time. Take that password, run it through the encryption, and compare the resulting hash to the hash of the database. If they match, the password is the same...