Securely keeping secrets and passwords

We've cautioned several times about the importance of safely handling user identification information. The intention to safely handle that data is one thing, but it is important to follow through and actually do so. While we're using a few good practices so far, as it stands, the Notes application would not withstand any kind of security audit:

  • User passwords are kept in clear text in the database
  • The authentication tokens for Twitter et al, are in the source code in clear text
  • The authentication service API key is not a cryptographically secure anything, it's just a cleartext UUID

If you don't recognize the phrase clear text, it simply means unencrypted. Anyone could read the text of user passwords ...

Get Node.js Web Development - Fourth Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.