This week we learned about authentication and sessions.

One method of authentication is HTTP Basic Auth, which is just username:password. However, passwords should not be passed as plain text because it is easily intercepted and read. There are many encryption methods, but we focused on BCrypt. BCrypt is an adaptive hashing function that uses a changing key factor that makes it resistant to hacking/cracking.

We did not implement BCrypt ourselves, but we used the bcrypt package on npm to hash our passwords to implement authentication on our web apps. We also tracked users with express-sessions.