Salt And Hash A Password With Postgres' pgcrypto

The pgcrypto extension that ships with PostgreSQL can be used to do a number of interesting things. This includes functions for doing salted password hashing. Using the crypt and gen_salt functions, we can securely store a user password and later compare it to plain-text passwords for authentication purposes.

create extension pgcrypto;

select crypt('pa$$w0rd', gen_salt('bf'));
                            crypt
--------------------------------------------------------------
 $2a$06$Z7wmrkYMOyLboLcULUYzNe6nHUcWywSZTt6nSrT5Xdv/VLdJ4g99K

> select (
    '$2a$06$Z7wmrkYMOyLboLcULUYzNe6nHUcWywSZTt6nSrT5Xdv/VLdJ4g99K' =
    crypt(
      'pa$$w0rd',
      '$2a$06$Z7wmrkYMOyLboLcULUYzNe6nHUcWywSZTt6nSrT5Xdv/VLdJ4g99K'
    )
  ) as matched;
 matched
---------
 t

> select (
    '$2a$06$Z7wmrkYMOyLboLcULUYzNe6nHUcWywSZTt6nSrT5Xdv/VLdJ4g99K' =
    crypt(
      'password',
      '$2a$06$Z7wmrkYMOyLboLcULUYzNe6nHUcWywSZTt6nSrT5Xdv/VLdJ4g99K'
    )
  ) as matched;
 matched
---------
 f

The salt value is generated using the blowfish encryption algorithm (hence, the 'bf'). There is support for other algorithms such as md5.

See the pgcrypt documentation for more details.