Implementing password security and hashing passwords

In any web application that requires access, passwords are often the first line of defense against unauthorized access. As a developer, you will want to ensure that passwords are securely managed when building Flask applications. A critical component of password management in web applications is to never store passwords in plaintext.

Instead, passwords should be hashed, which is a one-way encryption process that produces a fixed-length output that cannot be reversed. When a user enters their password, it is hashed and compared with the stored hash. If the two hashes match, the password is correct. Hashing passwords can help protect against attacks such as brute-force and dictionary attacks.

Brute-force attacks involve trying every possible combination of characters to find a match, while dictionary attacks involve trying a pre-computed list of words. Hashing passwords makes it computationally infeasible for an attacker to reverse...