title: What is currently the most secure one-way encryption algorithm?
body: <p>As many will know, one-way encryption is a handy way to encrypt user passwords in databases. That way, even the administrator of the database cannot know a user's password, but will have to take a password guess, encrypt that with the same algorithm and then compare the result with the encrypted password in the database. This means that the process of figuring out the password requires massive amounts of guesses and a lot of processing power.</p>
  
  <p>Seeing that computers just keep getting faster and that mathematicians are still developing these algorithms, I'm wondering which one is the most secure considering modern computing power and encryption techniques.</p>
  
  <p>I've been using MD5 almost exclusively for years now, and I'm wondering if there's something more I should be doing. Should I be contemplating a different algorithm?</p>
  
  <p>Another related question: How long should a field typically be for such an encrypted password? I must admit that I know virtually nothing about encryption, but I'm assuming that an MD5 hash (as an example) can be longer and would presumably take more processing power to crack. Or does the length of the field not matter at all, provided that the encrypted password fits in it in the first place?</p>