How to create a strong and secure password in Node.js that cannot be decrypted

The best way to create a strong password

To create a strong password, We will use a very popular npm library known as bcryptjs which allows us to encrypt the plain text password.

The algorithm used in this library is a hashing algorithm.

The difference between encrypting a password and hashing a password is that encrypted passwords can be decrypted if we know the decryption key, but the hashing algorithm does not allow decryption and is more secure.

So let’s dive into it

Installation:

To install the package execute the following command from the terminal

npm install bcryptjs

To hash the password, it provides a hash method which returns a promise with the generated hashed password

const bcrypt = require("bcryptjs");
bcrypt.hash("thisismypassword", 8)
  .then(password => {
    console.log(password); // hashed password
});

The hash function accepts two arguments

1. Plain text password
2. The number of times the hashing algorithm should be executed to get a strong password and the recommended value by the author is 8 which will create a strong password and also will not take much time to hash it.

Now, you might be thinking about, how we can check if the password entered by the user is the same as the hashed password you might have stored in the database if it cannot be decrypted.

For that, bcryptjs provides a compare method that allows us to compare the plain text password and hashed password stored in the database.

The compare methods accept the following arguments

1. The plain text password
2. The hashed password to compare against

and it returns a promise with a boolean result.
If the passwords are matched, the result is true otherwise false.

bcrypt.hash("thisismypassword", 8)
 .then(password => {
  bcrypt.compare("thisismypassword", password)
    .then(isEqual => {
      console.log(isEqual); // true
   });
});

That’s it about this short article. Hope you learned something new today

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