Best practice for storing a single username and password

[tdrsam]

I'm making a website with an admin section that will only ever have one username and password. What's the best way to store that information? I've found info on hashing and salting passwords, but it's all a bit advanced for me, so I'm looking for the beginners method.

[weboutgateway]

Password encryption is very necessary when it comes to accounts to prevent the hacking for the informations especially for the project your currently doing and I recommend you to use the strevv base64 encode it is safe actually but to think of it that the advance method for me, however I can assure you for it's security and since you wanted a beginners method try to use the md5 its very easy for the password encryption method.

Thanks, Hope it helps.

[computerfox]

I usually encrypt the passwords myself. In house encryption I think prevents public knowledge of it but then you have to keep that knowledge in the safe.

[RonB]

Which username and password are you referring to? The one for the "admin" user of your app or the one that is used to connect to the database?

The usernames and passwords for authenticating users are stored in a database "users" table, not in your php code. The only username/password that you need to be concerned about is the one that is used to connect to the database.

PHP is an interpreted language, so the best you can do in this regard is to obfuscate these credentials by putting them in an external file. If the server admins are doing their job properly, storing the database username and password directly in the php script is almost as secure as storing them in an external file which the php script would need to parse in order to use them when connecting to the database.

If the server admins aren't doing their job, it's possible that your php source code would be displayed instead of just the resulting rendered html. In that case, your username and password would be displayed for all to see. To protect against that, those credentials should be stored in an external file outside of your webroot so that they won't be accessible from the outside. That file should have proper file permissions that only allow access by your account.

The next threat you need to worry about is a hacker gaining direct access to the server's file system. If that happens, then there's nothing you can do to secure your files. Protecting against that threat would need to be handled by the server admins.

The best security would be to not use an interpreted language.

[Rabbit]

tdrsam, you should hash and salt the password. There's no need for you to come up with an encryption algorithm by yourself. PHP provides a function for you.
http://php.net/manual/en/function.mcrypt-encrypt.php

computerfox, what did you mean by:

encrypt the passwords myself. In house encryption

Are you saying you are using an algorithm you developed yourself? The problem with creating your own algorithm, especially if you don't understand the maths behind cryptanalysis, is that they are subject to many more cryptanalysis attacks that don't affect the more well known algorithms.