Sadly, Plain text Passwords Are Still A Thing

In this day and age of websites being hacked, personal information being stolen, and companies large and small being targeted by hackers around the world, you would think most developers would go through their systems to make sure they are following best practices when it comes to security.

I understand “security” is big and scary and has many layers. Let’s start with something easy: passwords.

Last week, I signed up for a service. I’m not going to put them on blast, but after I signed up, I received an email with my new account information, including my password.

My heart skipped a beat.

That’s very bad.

If you get an email from a website, large or small, and it contains your password, be very wary. In the vast majority of situations, they are not storing that password in a secure way.

When I pressed them, they said it wasn’t a huge deal because they weren’t storing credit card details in there.

The reality is this: it doesn’t matter what you are or aren’t storing in your database or application. If you have weak security in one place, you have weak security everywhere. I would hazard a guess that the password strength and security for the other servers on that network aren’t great either.

So why do companies launch web applications with terrible password security? Some of it may be lack of knowledge, but that excuse is harder and harder to believe in today’s world.

For some companies, that’s the way its always been done. For others, they store passwords in plain text to make life easier for customers who have lost theirs. They think it’s easier to give them their password as opposed to reset it.

Finally, there’s cost. If have to retrofit your web application to store passwords securely, there is time and effort and resources needed to do that. Company executives may not see the return on investment, which is unfortunate.

One of the most popular posts on this blog was on I did in 2008 about passwords. Specifically, you should never store a user’s password in your database as plain text. This means not saving in  your database or text file exactly what the user typed in.

When developers store passwords this way, and an unauthorized person gains access, that attacker needs to do no work to get all user data. This comes from MediaTemple, who was hacked in 2009 and it was discovered they were storing passwords in plain text.

“Clear Text” is a method of storing passwords in a database so that they are human readable. This preference was made to provide customers a convenient way of managing access to their services, e.g. connecting a PHP app to MySQL. The “clear text” method can be less-secure than methods involving “encryption”, where passwords are not human-readable. This is less convenient for customers, but adds a layer of security. Properly secured databases can store passwords using either method, with the information kept private. However, if a database gets compromised, the encryption method is the only way to keep the information secure.

If you want to securely store your passwords, use a decent hashing algorithm, use a salt, or use a strong password library such as Bcrypt. Don’t store them as plain text. It isn’t hard, and it will help secure the information your users have trusted you with.

I think it’s fair for users to think that sites they give their personal information to will keep that information secure.