Ferreteria/sql/user account

About

• Purpose: tracks site users as a separate concept from customers. A user may or may not be a customer; a customer only becomes a user if they select a login ID. Later, users might also be admins or vendors.
• Used by: user_x_ugroup

Rules

• A user may have zero or more customers; a customer may have one user or none. This was initially done as a quick way to implement users within the existing structure; we'll have to decide later if it makes sense -- but it does seem to offer some advantages to the users.
• When checking out, a logged-in user has the option of choosing to use shipping and payment data from their existing customer records or entering new data for either (which will then be added as a new customer record).
• If the user is not logged in, new customer records (with no user ID) will be added regardless.

History

• 2013-09-25 initial design
• 2013-11-09 renamed from core_users to user
• 2013-12-26 (1) we need the email address too; (2) making UserName a unique key
• 2017-01-26 moved to Ferreteria, renamed "user_account", switched from MYISAM to INNODB; made "WhenCreated" NOT NULL

Fields

• PassSalt: random data prepended to the password before hashing in order to prevent precomputed lookup attacks if any hashed passwords are revealed (e.g. if the database is cracked)
  • One source advised that the salt should have at least as many bits as the hash result, which makes sense.
  • "Whirlpool" seems to be among the best of the hash algorithms available in PHP. Blowfish or bcrypt would be better, but availability is iffy.
• EmailAddr: email address, for resetting password on existing account; see RFC 3696 for length

SQL

<mysql>CREATE TABLE `user_account` (

 `ID`           INT              NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
 `UserName`     VARCHAR(31)      NOT NULL COMMENT "log in ID",
 `FullName`     VARCHAR(127) DEFAULT NULL COMMENT "optional 'real' name",
 `PassHash`     VARBINARY(128)   NOT NULL COMMENT "hash for [password+salt]",
 `PassSalt`     VARBINARY(128)   NOT NULL COMMENT "random prefix for hashing password",
 `EmailAddr`    VARCHAR(255)     NOT NULL COMMENT "email address",
 `WhenCreated`  DATETIME         NOT NULL COMMENT "when user was created",
 UNIQUE KEY(`UserName`),
 PRIMARY KEY(`ID`)

) ENGINE = INNODB;</mysql>