Let’s take a practical look into the world of password storage by starting with the most basic approach and what’s wrong with it. We’ll work through many of the common techniques and explain how they fall short. We’ll talk about the tools crackers use such as brute force, lookups, and rainbow tables to explain how the baddies wrench your users’ secrets from your stolen databases using several recent high-profile attacks as examples. How can you protect against a thread you don’t even understand?

Brad grew up in southern Missouri and after high school majored in Computer Science with a music minor at MidAmerica Nazarene University (Olathe, KS). Today he lives in Kansas City with his wife and three girls. Brad enjoys all sorts of international food and the great outdoors.

Brad has been programming ColdFusion for 12 years and has used every version of CF since 4.5. He first fell in love with ColdFusion as a way to easily connect a database to his website for dynamic pages. He enjoys configuring and performance tuning high-availability Windows and Linux ColdFusion environments as well as SQL Server.