Password Authentication

Learn about Hashing, Encryption, Encoding, and Obfuscation, how to implement usernames and passwords, and how to encrypt passwords.

Start

Key Concepts

Review core concepts you need to learn to master this subject

Cryptography

Symmetric Vs. Asymmetric Encryption

Hashing

Encoding

Obfuscation

Passport’s Local Strategy

Serializing & Deserializing Users with Passport

Logging In with passport-local

Cryptography

Cryptography is the process of encrypting and decrypting data in order to keep that data safe when storing or transmitting it.

Encryption is a way of hiding data by converting it to an encoded format.
Decryption is a way of revealing encrypted data by decoding it from its encoded format.

Passport.js Local Authentication

Lesson 1 of 2

1
Introduction to Passport.js
Passport.js is a flexible authentication middleware for Node.js that can be added to any Express-based application. With Passport.js we can implement authentication using the concept of *strategies…
Start
2
Configuring Passport.js
One of the great things about using Passport.js is that a lot of the heavy lifting is taken care of by the module. In order to use it, we need to configure it and implement cookies and sessions for…
Start
3
Passport's Local Strategy
With Passport configured, we can now set up the passport-local strategy for authenticating with a username and password. First, we can configure the local strategy by creating a new instance of it…
Start
4
Serializing and Deserializing Users
If authentication succeeds, a session will be established and maintained via a cookie set in the user’s browser. However, if a user logs in and refreshes the page, the user data won’t persist acros…
Start
5
Logging In
In this exercise, we’ll take a look at the endpoints to log in a user. In order to log in a user we first need a POST request that takes in user credentials. We can add passport middleware in orde…
Start
6
User Registration I
Let’s learn how to register a user without a database. In a real production environment, you should use a database, but we’ve simplified this example to focus on the creation of new users. Inste…
Start
7
User Registration II
Let’s use the createUser() helper function in our routes. We’ll add the logic to create users in a POST request to “/register”. Since we’re working with promises, we can create an asynchronous rou…
Start
8
Logging Out
Now, let’s take a look at how to log users out. Passport.js exposes a logout function within the request object: req.logout. The function can be called from any route handler in order to terminate …
Start
9
Review
Fantastic job! We have covered a lot regarding authentication and Passport.js. In the workspace, we’ve provided you a sandbox with authentication implemented in case you want further experiment wit…
Start