How does the use of a salt in PHP impact the process of password hashing and verification for user authentication?

When hashing passwords for user authentication in PHP, adding a salt helps increase the security of the hashed password. A salt is a random string of characters that is added to the password before hashing, making it more difficult for attackers to crack the hashed password using rainbow tables or other precomputed methods. 

```php
$password = 'user_password';
$salt = 'random_salt_string';
$hashed_password = hash('sha256', $password . $salt);
```

In this code snippet, we first define the user's password and a random salt string. We then concatenate the password and salt before hashing them using the SHA-256 algorithm. This ensures that even if two users have the same password, their hashed passwords will be different due to the unique salt added to each.

Keywords

PHP salt password hashing user authentication verification

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