Hey @windly,
I hadn’t heard of AES_ENCRYPT until you mentioned it but I’ve had a little read.
Under my sign off I’ve just flagged some potential security concerns. Please feel free to disregard as you may well have this all in hand and know more than me.
To be able to get this working from you I need to know more about your implementation.
From reading it appears that AES_ENCRYPT takes two arguments. The first would be your users password and the second would be a key string (which I will refer to as the salt as I believe it takes on this role in password hashing).
Is the ‘salt’ just a string? I can see this using the current salt integration in the plugin so it could be from a different field or a single string. If you’re doing something different let me know. I noticed some AES examples hashed a string for example.
Thanks David,
Tom
Please feel free to disregard this comment but I would encourage you to read the section “Hash and Salt Your Users’ Passwords” from this article. It will show some of the potential limitations and security risks to your users in this password securing method. I haven’t read about this method fully and I don’t yet know your full implementation but my initial concerns would be surrounding:
– The algorithm being too fast to calculate making brute force attacks easier
– That the algorithm is not a hash but a two way encryption meaning that developers could have the potential to access users passwords (depending on your implementation
– Not using unique salts?
Not judging as you might have this all in hand, just sharing ??
