Why not use AES for password encryption in PHP?

Question

Everywhere I have seen people talking about storing passwords in a database, they have almost always used MD5.

What is wrong with AES, or SHA1?

Answer 1

The use of AES as a symmetric cipher for passwords would be a volation of CWE-257 and there for a vulnerability. It is possible to use a symmetric cipher as a hash function. Old unix passwords use DES as a hash function and newer unix systems use blowfish as a hash function. But even though its a block cipher, its being used as a one-way function, which is a requirement for any password storage system.

For php you should use sha256.