Hashing passwords with md5 (or sha1, or even sha256) is not safe anymore, because these hashes can be decrypted very easily.This is still not good enough though (rainbow tables). PHP 5.5+ came with a password_hash function to generate secure, one-way hashing along with a password_verify function to match a hashed password with the given password. For a developer security is always a priority so you should always be securely storing user passwords. We has passwords due to security concern and information leakage concern. If we store passwords in plain text then it can be compromised of information very easily. ...