Ruby on Rails — bcrypt Password Protection and User Authentication (2024)

FAQs

Ruby on Rails — bcrypt Password Protection and User Authentication? ›

Using Bcrypt in Ruby on Rails

To verify a password using bcrypt, use the bcrypt. compare() function. This function compares a plaintext password provided by the user during login with the hashed password stored in the database.

Renowned for its formidable defense in preserving stored passwords, bcrypt, stemming from the 1999 Blowfish cipher algorithm, has evolved into a bastion of password security.

Using Bcrypt in Ruby on Rails

The has_secure_password method automatically hashes and stores the password in the database when a new user is created. The authenticate method checks the provided password against the hashed password stored in the database.

Devise is a flexible and comprehensive authentication solution for Ruby on Rails applications. It is regarded as the most popular and battle-tested gem in the Rails ecosystem for handling user authentication.

It's closely bound to Authentication, but it's different. Think about an international conference about climate change. Authentication is the entrance ticket, you can not enter the conference without the ticket. Authorization is about checking the ticket levels of access : does it allow you to access gate A or snack B?

When you create a new rails app, a file called credentials. yml. enc is added to the config directory. This file will be decrypted in a production environment using a key stored either on a RAILS_MASTER_KEY environment variable or a master.

What is the disadvantage of bcrypt? ›

Bcrypt is slower and requires some memory (4 kiB IIRC), so one spends 100ms to check a valid password whereas an attacker needs days / years to crack it because he's slowed down and can't use GPUs efficiently.

bcrypt: Still considered secure, but potentially vulnerable to FPGA attacks. Its fixed memory usage (4KB) is a limitation compared to more modern algorithms. scrypt: Very secure due to its memory-hardness, but slightly less so than Argon2.

Even with higher computer speeds, bcrypt is very time-consuming to hack via brute force thanks to its variable number of password iterations. Compare this to popular hashing algorithms such as MD5 and SHA256, which are designed to hash quickly.

Instead of using the anchor ( <a> ) HTML tags for links, Rails provides the link_to helper to add links. Remember, Ruby code in the views must be enclosed in a <% %> or a <%= %> tag.

Reading and Parsing JSON Files

Manipulating JSON data in Ruby can be done easily with the JSON gem. This gem provides an API for parsing JSON from text, as well as generating JSON files from arbitrary Ruby objects. Once the JSON gem is installed, you need to call it with the require 'json'.

To add reCAPTCHA to your Rails application without using a gem, you need to manually integrate the reCAPTCHA API into your application. This involves adding the reCAPTCHA script to your form, verifying the user's response on the server side, and handling the verification result.

Dropping the database is done by running the following command: DROP DATABASE “your_database”; If you refresh your Postgres DB tree you should now see that your databases have been dropped. Right so back to Rails and you then can use the following command to recreate your database.