title: Why encrypt user passwords?
body: <blockquote>
    <p><strong>Possible Duplicate:</strong><br>
    <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3107810/why-arent-original-passwords-stored">Why aren&rsquo;t original passwords stored?</a>  </p>
  </blockquote>
  
  
  
  <p>Why would one store encrypted user passwords in a database, if the password is the least valuable part of the data? It doesn't seem like it would affect external attacks; setting a limited number of login attempts per day per account would be effective. It doesn't seem like it would affect internal attacks; if someone can access the passwords, they've also got access to the more valuable data in the rest of the database.</p>
  
  <p>Am I missing something here? Shouldn't the entire database be encrypted using user passwords as a key for the password encryption itself to be effective?</p>
  
  <p>Combined his post below with his question:</p>
  
  <p>Ok, I asked the question in a bad way. Let me rephrase this.</p>
  
  <p>If someone breaks into this system, the fact that they have the user's passwords is one of the least of my concerns. I'll be encrypting passwords but in my humble opinion, the other data in the database is way more valuable. Assume that if an internal attacker has that data, they don't care about the passwords.</p>
  
  <p>If nothing else in the database is encrypted and everything else in the database is what an attacker actually wants, did encrypting passwords actually solve anything?</p>