Password hashing uses bcrypt, argon2, or scrypt

Storing passwords with MD5, SHA-1, or unkeyed SHA-256 is a critical failure under CWE-916 and OWASP A02 (Cryptographic Failures). These algorithms are designed for speed, not password storage: an attacker who exfiltrates your database can crack billions of candidates per second on commodity hardware. A single database breach becomes a full credential compromise across every account. NIST 800-53 IA-5(1) mandates password-based authenticator storage use salted, one-way, adaptive hashing. Bcrypt, argon2id, or scrypt are the only acceptable choices because their cost factors are tunable to keep brute-force prohibitively expensive even as hardware improves.

Replace any non-adaptive hash with bcrypt (rounds ≥12) or argon2id in your auth library. For bcryptjs:

import bcrypt from 'bcryptjs'

const SALT_ROUNDS = 12
const hash = await bcrypt.hash(plainPassword, SALT_ROUNDS)
const valid = await bcrypt.compare(plainPassword, storedHash)

For new projects prefer argon2id per OWASP 2024: memoryCost: 65536, timeCost: 3. Migrate existing insecure hashes by re-hashing on next successful login and forcing a password reset for inactive accounts after 90 days.