Types of authorization

[corruption]

I was wondering if someone with more knowledge than i could possibly offer some advantages/disadvantages to different types of user authentication using php

[marque]

Ive often been skeptical of sending posted data through any system. I don't know the logistics of it but I know people can scan for ports and get data that has been posted, or displayed on a website. Hence the introduction of SSL encrypted data.

Since reading an article on php mag I decided to start encrypting passwords send from a login form on my websites.

I found a cool md5 javascript that will enctypt my data before I send it off for posting.

http://pajhome.org.uk/crypt/md5/md5src.html

I run this script onlick of the login button, both the username and password get posted to an sql query eg

select * from users where username = '".$_POST['username']."'

then I check to see if the password is correct by

if(md5($row['password']) === $_POST['password'])

if it checks out then the user is in.

Hope this helps.