What is your experience with secure methods of storing confidential data in banking or financial systems?

In banking and financial systems, encryption and hashing methods are used to securely store confidential data. For example, user passwords are typically stored as salted hashes, using algorithms like bcrypt or Argon2, to prevent reverse engineering of the password.

For storing data such as card numbers or personal information, symmetric encryption (AES) with secure key management is used, often with hardware security modules (HSM).

It is also important to apply principles of least privilege, encrypt data at rest and in transit (TLS), and regularly conduct security audits and monitoring.

An example of password hashing in Python using bcrypt:

import bcrypt

password = b"supersecret"
salt = bcrypt.gensalt()
hashed = bcrypt.hashpw(password, salt)

# Password verification
if bcrypt.checkpw(password, hashed):
    print("Password is correct")
else:
    print("Incorrect password")