Question: ### NOTE: Pardon my ignorance of encryption, I learned about these concepts today

Going to rephrase this question, but I think I already have fine answers provided. I need to have a block of data containing a message (user imputed) that is included in what I want to encrypt. I also need to have some means of authenticating the user, such as a password. The password will most likely be hashed for extra security. I am considering using a RSA public and private key pair of which the attacker can know, but wont be able to use, as he/she will need to authenticate themselves with a password of which they cannot know. Both the message (which I do not want the attacker to know) and the hashed password will be included inside the RSA encrypted data block (aka: RSA('message block', sha256('password')) ). Right now, my main question is if this is secure or not.

Answer: 
if you want to use a password, [SRP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Remote_Password_protocol) is probably a good choice.
alternatively, you could use ECDHE with ECDSA or RSA keys.
you should also use a MAC of some sort if you're using CBC (and **encrypt then MAC**). GCM or OCB would be much better choices.
There is multiple solutions that's more sophisticated than this one. But you could easy authenticate the user if you have a secret that both the server and the client knows. By using the HMAC protocol example: 

```
SHA256 ( SHA256 ( data_before_encryption ) + secret )

```

You create a hash of the the data you are sending before you encrypt it, and then you append the secret to that hash, and then create a new hash from the old hash + secret. The server can authenticate the user by doing the same operation after the data is decrypted. You can use SHA256 to this.