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LESSON 86 OF 173 · BACKEND: USERS AND SECURITY

Never Store Passwords in Go

Practice

Until now, sign-up wrote the password itself into the users table. If that table ever leaks, every account is open, and many people use the same password on other sites too. A shop should never store passwords.

Hashes: store a hash instead, a one-way scramble of the password: easy to compute, no way back. The function hashPassword, already in your code, also mixes in a random salt (8 bytes from crypto/rand), so the same password gives a different result every time:

fmt.Println(hashPassword("tulip7"))   // sha256$...$...
fmt.Println(hashPassword("tulip7"))   // another salt, another hash

The result holds the method, the salt and the hash, split by $. (The helper uses SHA-256 to keep the code short; real shops use a hash that is slow on purpose, such as bcrypt.) The tests read the table through GET /check/users, a route the course adds for checking, which shows each different salt and hash as a numbered label. With your changes, the test requests get:

POST /register  {"email": "ana@example.com", "password": "secret123"}  →  201  {"email": "ana@example.com", "id": 1}
POST /register  {"email": "ana@example.com", "password": "hello456"}   →  409  {"error": "Email already registered"}
POST /register  {"email": "ben@example.com", "password": "secret123"}  →  201  {"email": "ben@example.com", "id": 2}
GET /check/users  →  200  [{"email": "ana@example.com", "id": 1, "password_hash": "sha256$<salt 1>$<hash 1>"},
                           {"email": "ben@example.com", "id": 2, "password_hash": "sha256$<salt 2>$<hash 2>"}]

Ana and Ben chose the same password, yet their rows share nothing but the method.

Your task: name the last column of CREATE TABLE password_hash instead of password, compute passwordHash in the POST /register handler, and insert the hash instead of the password. hashPassword and its imports are already there.


Assignment
Follow the Coding Tutorial to store a salted hash at sign-up instead of the password.


Hint
Hash only after the 409 check, then pass passwordHash as the second value of the INSERT. Keep the result of db.Exec in res: the line below reads res.LastInsertId(), and until res exists Go stops with undefined: res.


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    Auth Hash Passwords in Go

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