Comparison
Encryption at restvsPassword hashing
Encryption at rest
the data on disk is encrypted, which protects you against a stolen drive and against nothing that happens through your own API.
Encrypting stored data so the ciphertext is useless without the key. It satisfies a real threat model — physical media, backup files, decommissioned disks — and a lot of compliance text. It does nothing against an attacker who has your application's access, because your application decrypts transparently.
Full entry →Password hashing
you store a deliberately slow one-way hash with a per-user salt, so a stolen database is not a list of passwords.
Storing a slow, salted, one-way derivation of a password rather than the password or a fast hash of it. Slowness is the feature: bcrypt, scrypt and argon2 exist to make offline guessing expensive. General-purpose hashes like SHA-256 are wrong here precisely because they are fast, and the work factor needs raising as hardware improves.
Full entry →