When storing passwords, the only proper secure method is to run the passwords through some hashing algorithm. A hashing algorithm takes a string of characters or bytes and converts them into a new string which cannot be reversed into the original string. For years, MD5 and SHA were the common hashes used for storing passwords in web application, however due to significant improvements to hardware speed and parallelism, MD5 and SHA (even salted MD5 and SHA) have proven to be completely ineffective in the event of a password table leak.... (more)