bcrypt-hash | Generate secure cryptographic hashes from the command-line | Hashing library

I am currently coding a loadUserByUsername method in a UserDetailsServiceImpl java class similarily found in many springboot tutorials. The problem is in the last line

On windows, I am trying to switch to the recommended Mongo Realm Authenticator as suggested in the documentation, however, when setting up my restheart.yml file exactly as shown in the documentation I receive this error on startup:

"ERROR org.restheart.plugins.PluginsFactory - Error injecting dependency to AuthMechanism basicAuthMechanism: Authenticator mongoRealmAuthenticator not found"

Here is the relevant section of my restheart.yml for reference.

so quite simply I'm looking to incorporate the bcrpyt regex into an egrep command to see whether a bcrypt hash is present on each line.

I currently do this with MD5 hashes, quite easily:

I'm creating a small web API using Spring Boot 2.3.1 with Spring Data and a few other minor packages. The project is simply an authentication microservice. I'll try to simplify things to focus on the problem.

Let's assume the application will have an entity User (username, password), UserRepository, AuthenticationService, and AuthenticationController with endpoints /register and /authenticate which handles POST-request with a username and password {"username": "Bob", "password": "pass"} also exists a postgres database with a table users with columns username varchar(16) & password varchar(60) and it will store usernames and password-hashes.

The goal of /authenticate endpoint is to return true if the user exists and password matches or otherwise false.

I'm not sure whether Spring Security is a best-case solution for such small functionality, maybe I should use simply some package that implements Bcrypt-hashing?

I have password which is hashed in database while saving it. But I am now implementing login module and not able to compare two passwords in spring [boot] data jpa. This is trying comparing text password that I enter to the password that is hashed in database which obviously fails.

I know this has been answered here using java for general case but not for spring boot.

I somehow need to manipulate logic in this code

According to this answer, I should save my String BCrypt hashed password, passHash, as a BINARY or BINARY(60) (I chose BINARY(60)) when storing it in my MySQL table (I stored it in a column named passHash).

Now when I select and retrieve that passHash column value from my table into Java, it is now a byte[] data type.

How do I then convert it back to its String form so that I can validate it using my validateLogin() method below:

I've implemented Bcrypt on SQL Server. It's working fine.

I'm trying now to create a procedure where the user send his username and password (unhashed) and the procedure will return whether he is allowed to do so or not.

Searching for the proper way to store BCrypt hashes in MySQL I found this question and it only made me more confuse.

The accepted answer point out that we should use:

CHAR(60) BINARY or BINARY(60)

But other people on the comments argue that instead we should use:

CHAR(60) CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_bin

or even:

COLLATE latin1_general_cs

I am not a specialist on databases so could anyone explain me the difference between all these options and which one is truly better for storing BCrypt hashes?