Web Development Forum

Great topic! For password hashing, always use strong, modern algorithms like bcrypt or Argon2. Avoid MD5 or SHA-1. Salt each password individually and use a sufficient number of rounds.

For session management, consider using HTTP-only and secure cookies to store session IDs. This helps mitigate XSS attacks.

// Example using bcrypt (conceptual)
async function hashPassword(password) {
    const saltRounds = 10;
    const hash = await bcrypt.hash(password, saltRounds);
    return hash;
}

JWT (JSON Web Tokens) are excellent for stateless authentication, especially for APIs and SPAs. Ensure you sign them with a strong secret and consider using expiration claims. Keep sensitive data out of the payload, as it's only encoded, not encrypted.

For CSRF protection, implement CSRF tokens. These should be unique per user session and checked on every state-changing request. Synchronizer Token Pattern is a widely adopted approach.

// JWT example (conceptual)
const jwt = require('jsonwebtoken');
const secretKey = process.env.JWT_SECRET;

function generateToken(userId) {
    return jwt.sign({ userId }, secretKey, { expiresIn: '1h' });
}

function verifyToken(token) {
    try {
        return jwt.verify(token, secretKey);
    } catch (err) {
        return null;
    }
}

Thanks @SecureCoder and @AuthNinja! What about rate limiting for login attempts? And best practices for multi-factor authentication (MFA)?