[Wikitech-l] MD5 Password Encryption

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 If I am not mistaken (and I may very well be), MediaWiki still uses MD5s to encrypt (well, technically hash, but it's named wfEncryptPassword(), heh heh) user passwords. function wfEncryptPassword( $userid, $password ) { global $wgPasswordSalt; $p = md5( $password); if($wgPasswordSalt) return md5( "{$userid}-{$p}" ); else return $p; } If this is indeed the case, we should be considering migrating away from MD5 to a more secure algorithm like SHA256. The breadth of attacks against this hashing scheme have grown incredibly sophisticated, and over where I consult, we generally discourage new developers from using MD5 for any security related purposes (still makes a fine good checksum though). Migrating the hashes would probably prove to be tricky, but if we implement appropriate hooks, with the addition of only one new field we could easily "magically" update the fields once a user logs in, and the system is (for one short request) in possession of the plaintext password. The old algorithm could be supported indefinitely, but only for old user accounts that haven't upgraded yet, all new accounts would use the new hashing scheme. We could even rename the function into something more accurate! What say the developers?