Some notes about arrays in PHP over here: PHP: Frankenstein arrays. I was already aware of most of that but I thought the notes at the bottom about supporting JSON were handy:
If you want to enforce an array to encode to a JSON list (all array keys will be discarded), use:
json_encode(array_values($array));
And if you want to enforce an array to encode to a JSON object, use:
json_encode((object)$array);
Also array_is_list is available as of PHP 8.1.
Today on 8.3.6 Multiple-Column Indexes I learned about the hash index technique:
SELECT * FROM tbl_name WHERE hash_col=MD5(CONCAT(val1,val2)) AND col1=val1 AND col2=val2;
As they say: “As an alternative to a composite index, you can introduce a column that is “hashed” based on information from other columns. If this column is short, reasonably unique, and indexed, it might be faster than a “wide” index on many columns. In MySQL, it is very easy to use this extra column.”
Found an interesting article: About Secure Password Hashing.
Today I read Salted Password Hashing – Doing it Right which was a good run-down on how to do password hashing. The article linked to phpass: Portable PHP password hashing framework which is a library for hashing passwords.
Learned about the Portable PHP password hashing framework today.
I was looking for a good overview article that explained the process of password hashing and I found Password Encryption, Hashing, Salting Explained which was a pretty good run down.
On a related note I reread the Wikipedia page on HMAC.
Raz suggests adding a HMAC to our password hashing scheme.