Possibly one of the biggest hurdles that stands in the way of fostering innovation and discovering newer and better techniques of doing old things is the ease with which developers and designers today can quickly research and find so-called “best practices.” While a quick Google search for “user table structure” or “best way to design password reset” can reduce (but never extinguish!) outlandish practices and horrific mistakes, it does nothing to encourage developers to think outside the box, and results in the perpetuation of less-than-optimal approaches.

To that end, there’s one thing in particular that virtually all documented approaches get wrong, and that’s writing to the database when you should be using modern cryptography instead. It might sound like a bit of a non-sequitur — after all, what does storing information have to do with cryptography when one usually exists only to supplement the other? Which is exactly right. Too often, you’ll find software writing to the database not because it needs to store something, but because it needs to guarantee something. Which is what cryptography is for.

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