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We've got a big problem, a big security flaw

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in our current signup process.

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We've got a couple of problems, actually.

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One problem, for example,

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also is that we don't validate the user input.

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I'll come back to that later, and what I mean by that.

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But the even bigger problem right now is

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that we're storing the password

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as plain text in that database.

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So here in the database,

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I have the password just as I entered it as a user

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on the website a couple of seconds ago.

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And why is that a problem?

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It is a problem because if this database

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should ever get compromised,

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if we got an employee who decides to do bad things

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and wants to extract some user passwords,

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or if we're getting hacked,

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which can happen, even if we're trying all to prevent it.

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But if we're getting hacked

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and someone gets access to this database,

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he or she will be able to get all the user data

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with all the raw passwords.

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And we have all read about data breaches like this

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in the news.

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Where some company did store passwords as plain text,

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as we are doing it here right now.

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And when that database then got compromised,

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and the data got lost or stolen,

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then all that data could just be used like this

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by criminals.

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And since users, for example,

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tend to use the same password on multiple pages,

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no matter if that is recommended or not, it's the reality.

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Since users use the same password on multiple pages,

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if I can extract your password from this page,

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I can also try this email password combination

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on other pages, like your online banking account,

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or your Amazon account.

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And that's all not good.

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So therefore, what you should do

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if you're storing user credentials in a database

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is you should always hash the password.

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Hashing the password simply means that you change it.

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You don't change it randomly,

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but you use some algorithm for changing it,

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and you change it as such that it can't be converted back.

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This might sound strange because in the future,

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you also need to be able to verify the password.

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But when you use a hashing algorithm,

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that algorithm will be able to compare an unhashed password

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to a hashed password,

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and find out if the unhashed password

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would lead to the same hash

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without reverting the hash.

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Might sound all very cryptic.

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But in the end, it is a way of ensuring

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that you can store a password

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in an obscured way in a database,

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and in a way that can't be decoded,

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and still be able to verify the password in the future.

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And therefore, that is something we should do here.

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We should hash the password

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before we store it in the database.

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Hence for the moment here, I will just delete my user here,

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and delete the user with the email test@test.com

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because I don't want a user with that password here.

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And we'll implement this password hashing

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in our website now.

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Now, hashing passwords is a complex task

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because you need an algorithm that converts passwords

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such that they can't be decoded.

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A very popular third party package

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that does this for us

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is the becrypt.js package.

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You can just search for it

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to find its official documentation here.

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Here you'll learn how you can use it and how it works.

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And this package will ensure that we can convert strings,

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like passwords, into undecodable, hashed strings

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which look random to humans,

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but which follow a certain pattern,

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but which can't be decoded back to the original password.

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So let's stop our server here,

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and simply install becrypt.js

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by running npm install becryptjs.

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And then once this package is installed,

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we can start our server again.

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And in demo.js at the very top,

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where we have all our imports,

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we now want to import becrypt by requiring

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becryptjs like this.

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And now we can use this third party library

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to hash our passwords.

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So now here

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in our signup post route,

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instead of storing the password like this,

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we will, first of all,

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create a hashed password here by using bcrypt.

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And there we can call the hash method,

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which does what the name implies.

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It takes a string like our password,

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and then creates a hash.

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So such an obscured string based on it.

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For this, we pass our entered password

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as a first parameter value.

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And then the second value is a number that

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in the end determines how strong the hashing is.

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If it's not strong enough, it could be decoded,

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but a value of 12 here

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should actually produce a fairly secure password,

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which can't be decoded.

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So where you can't infer the original password.

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Now, hash actually returns a promise.

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So here we also have to await this.

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So then at some point, we got this hashed password,

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and now it's this hashed password,

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which we should store in the database

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instead of the unhashed password.

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So now here we can save this,

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and with that, if we now go back and create a user again.

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Like this.

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We still are redirected.

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We still get no error here.

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But if I now have a look at all my users again here

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in my database, we now see that for this user,

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now we don't store the original password,

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which was entered,

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but this string here,

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which clearly gives us no clues about the original passwords

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and which, as I mentioned before,

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can't be decoded back to the original password.

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Still, we'll be able to verify the entered password

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in the future.

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That's the great thing about it.

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But now with that,

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if this database ever gets compromised or hacked,

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you won't be able to just use that password

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to log into other websites,

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because this isn't the original password.

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It's a hash, which you can't convert back

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to the original password.

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And therefore, this is a huge security step up,

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which you absolutely should have in your websites.