When creating a user authentication system, security is very important. Guides to building authentication systems for a web application often discuss storing user passwords as hashes of the real password in the database. This prevents the password from being stored in plain text, and as such the real passwords are protected from anyone who might gain access to the database. When a user registers a new account, the password is hashed by the application and then stored in the database. Whenever they subsequently log in, the password they use to log in is hashed and compared to the hash stored in the database. Since hashes are unique, if the two hashes match, the user has entered the correct password and is successfully authenticated.
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