I know that there are more than a dozen questions about this. But I want to know if it would be better to encrypt passwords for a login system with hash methods like sha1, sha512 etc or would it be better to use Mcrypt ciphers for this ?
I know that decrypting after encrypting with hash methods like sha it's impossible, and if encrypting using mcrypt it's possible. But is it safe to use mcrypt since you can also decrypt ?
Passwords must not be recoverable. The point of hashing them is to make sure that if the database is compromised, the attacker can't get access to every password and thus every user's account (and every account on other services where the password has been reused).