What are the best practices for utilizing salts in PHP encryption to prevent rainbow table attacks?

To prevent rainbow table attacks in PHP encryption, it is essential to use salts to add random data to the plaintext before hashing. This makes it harder for attackers to precompute hashes and compare them against the hashed passwords. By using unique salts for each password, even if two users have the same password, their hashed values will be different due to the salts. 

// Generate a random salt
$salt = random_bytes(16);

// Combine the password with the salt
$hashed_password = hash('sha256', $password . $salt);

// Store the hashed password and salt in the database
// When verifying the password, retrieve the salt for the user and hash the input password with the retrieved salt

Keywords

salts PHP encryption rainbow table attacks security hashing

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