Does anyone have any advice about creating a user account name and password and passing it to a server to established the account via network.request POST? I assume you're supposed to hash the data but I've never coded anything like that before and am not sure what the best practices are? Would you use one of the crypto functions?

Md5 the password ( http://developer.anscamobile.com/reference/index/cryptomd5 ), use an HTTPS network request to pass the hash to your server.