Building a Command-Line Chat App with Node.js and Socket.IO — Part 5

The other parts of this project are as follows:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

Goals

In this final part, we aim to implement two functionalities as follows:

1. Configure an authentication mechanism with passwords
2. Secure communication between clients and servers

Let’s get started

Password-Based Authentication

A user credential is a user name and password that is bound to a particular user. In order to connect to the chat server, clients must provide their user credentials by sending the join event as the following specification:

On the server-side, we’ll design a simple schema that has only one table named accounts in which we define two columns, namely username and password as follows:

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We also use the SQLite database for handling data. However, passwords should never be stored clearly in the database. Hence, we must use a hash algorithm, for example, bcrypt in our project.

For more information about bcrypt, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt

Setting up

Install bcrypt for our project using npm as follows:

% npm install bcrypt

Hashing passwords

to be continued

Comparing passwords

to be continued

Secure communication

to be continued