I've been reading up on the benefits of salting and hashing passwords, but one thing still eludes me...
When I provide a random salt for each user, how do I then know what the salt was when I try to authenticate them to login?
so if I do..
HASHPW = PW.RANDOMNUMBER
I could store the random number in the database, but that seems to kill the entire point of adding the salt.. doesn't it? I could also use a non random number for each salt, but then that also kills the point of the salt because if they figure it out they have all my users passwords...
I just started learning PHP and MySQL and abstract things like this have been confusing me
Thanks!