---
title: BCrypt Password basics in Ruby
slug: bcrypt-password-basics-in-ruby
published_at: 2024-01-09 13:30:07 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:12:51 +0000
summary: 
description: This video explains how to use the Bcrypt password class in Ruby to securely hash and store passwords. We&#39;ll look at how a user&#39;s encrypted password is stored in the database as a hashed string that can&#39;t be reversed. To check if a password matches, you initialize a Bcrypt::Password object with the hashed password, then compare it to a plain text password using the == operator, which Bcrypt overrides to check if the hashes match.  Bcrypt handles salting and key stretching internally to make brute force attacks harder. When creating a hash, Bcrypt takes time to run its key derivation function, which can be configured by increasing the cost parameter. We&#39;ll look at how to check properties of a bcrypt password like cost, version, and valid hash.  Overall, bcrypt provides a simple interface in Ruby for securely hashing passwords. By storing the bcrypt password hashes rather than plain text passwords, the passwords are securely encrypted at rest in the database. Bcrypt is an industry-standard for password hashing.  #rubyonrails #ruby #rails
tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, javascript, ruby on rails, active record, ruby on rails tutorial]
views: 905
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/bcrypt-password-basics-in-ruby
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTt1628yNGg
youtube_id: HTt1628yNGg
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/HTt1628yNGg
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/HTt1628yNGg/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# BCrypt Password basics in Ruby

*Published: January 09, 2024*
*Views: 905*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTt1628yNGg)

[![BCrypt Password basics in Ruby](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/HTt1628yNGg/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTt1628yNGg)

## Description

This video explains how to use the Bcrypt password class in Ruby to securely hash and store passwords. We&#39;ll look at how a user&#39;s encrypted password is stored in the database as a hashed string that can&#39;t be reversed. To check if a password matches, you initialize a Bcrypt::Password object with the hashed password, then compare it to a plain text password using the == operator, which Bcrypt overrides to check if the hashes match.

Bcrypt handles salting and key stretching internally to make brute force attacks harder. When creating a hash, Bcrypt takes time to run its key derivation function, which can be configured by increasing the cost parameter. We&#39;ll look at how to check properties of a bcrypt password like cost, version, and valid hash.

Overall, bcrypt provides a simple interface in Ruby for securely hashing passwords. By storing the bcrypt password hashes rather than plain text passwords, the passwords are securely encrypted at rest in the database. Bcrypt is an industry-standard for password hashing.

#rubyonrails #ruby #rails

## Transcript

what&#39;s up welcome back in this episode we&#39;re going to talk about the bcrypt password class in Ruby and how it is used to hash and store passwords encrypted in the database let&#39;s talk about a user so if I have my myself user. find by email okay I get back this user object and if I tried to call. encrypted password this is some secret string that no one else knows about or can break or whatever and this string was created by bcrypt and it is a one-way it uses like a one-way hashing algorithm so you can&#39;t actually reverse this to figure out what the password is there&#39;s not a way to go backwards from the B crypted hash what you can do is go forwards and check to see if a plain text password matched this password one thing that we might do is say let&#39;s create a new password for this user and say user. password is equal to we&#39;re going to say testing one two3 okay so this is going to be our new password we say u. saave bang and that is going to update our U do our user password right now it&#39;s stored in memory so it&#39;s just written to a an instance variable on the user and that&#39;s for validation to do things like hey did they enter a password that had an enough numbers and letters and characters and things like that so we need the raw plain text password in memory for at least a short time but usually that&#39;s only for the duration of a single request when someone is signing up or logging in logging out so if we say let&#39;s just clear this again and we will say that we want to grab like the same user find by email is okay if we try to look at the encrypted password here again it looks like this giant hash right and so under the hood this is using the bcrypt password class and this has a few different methods on it you can call bcrypt password. create and you can pass in some my password and this will create a new password hash so we can call this a bunch of times and what you&#39;ll notice is that every single time that we call it even though we&#39;re passing in the same my password string it&#39;s giving us back a different hashed value so there&#39;s some like seed number in there and it&#39;s coming up with different information but you&#39;ll also notice that if we grab one of these passwords so let&#39;s grab the the the last one and we look at pass. class the class of this thing is actually a bcrypt password but it looks like a string it is stringy and is stored in the database as this string value so if we were to just say pass. 2s then we can work with it as if if it were a string right now it&#39;s converted into a string so let&#39;s say the pass two is pass. 2s what we can do now is we can initialize an instance of bcrypt password with this string value so we can say decrypt password. new so instead of calling create we&#39;re going to call new and we&#39;re going to initialize it with an instance of a string you can also inst use an instance of a password and now what we&#39;re getting back is a bcrypt password object okay so the bcrypt password object overrides the equals method to check to see if this bcrypt password that is initialized by the hash is equal to some raw plain text thing so here we can say my password right and now that says true is it equal to not my password it is not equal to not my password so what&#39;s happening under the hood here is it is bcrypt has its own way of confirming whether or not these hashes match so we don&#39;t have to deal with that all we need to do is know how to work directly with the password object or the this bcrypt password type so another thing we can do is check to see is the hash valid for pass two maybe it&#39;s valid hash and that comes back as true so that tells us whether or not like the string is valid if we look again at pass which again is an instance of bcrypt password this has a couple different methods on it so we can look at the cost for computing this we can look at the check sum we can look at the version so they they&#39;re going to have like different versions of how things are encrypted and depending on like how many times you want to run the sort of like encryption algorithm or whatever you can increase the cost for creating one of these you&#39;ll notice that when we create an instance of one of these hashes or when we check it takes a second to do that and that&#39;s because it&#39;s I guess we can also look at the salt when it is creating an instance of a password and hashing it it takes a little bit of compute power that&#39;s so that you can&#39;t it&#39;s to avoid brute forcing a bunch of different passwords so if we say another another one like you notice there is like a brief moment where is pausing as it&#39;s trying to create that and there is definitely a way that you can increase the number of like your cost of creating these so that it&#39;s just like more rounds of encryption so here on the bcrypt docs there&#39;s a bunch of other stuff that you can look into but yeah it&#39;s like a one-way hash so like the stuff that&#39;s stored in the database is all stored as encrypted at rest and so this is how this thing works it says U is user. find by email and then it says bcrypt password. new u. encrypted password so that&#39;s going to initialize an instance of bcrypt password and then it&#39;s going to say is this equal to whatever we made our password up here yeah testing one two3 and if it&#39;s true that&#39;s when we&#39;re allowed to log in so this is like whether or not we have like passed in the same or a that will hash to the same thing yeah there&#39;s details about how the hashing algorithm works but again it&#39;s one way it&#39;s a one-way situation an alias for that equals method is to use this is password so we can call do is password question mark and that is an alternative so yeah bcrypt is pretty industry standard in terms of encryption and storing stuff at rest so yeah that&#39;s bcrypt and password hashing thanks for watching see you in the next one

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