Linux Command Reference

DESCRIPTION

crypt() is the password encryption function. It is based on the Data Encryption Standard algorithm with variations intended (among other things) to discourage use of hardware implementations of a key search.

key is a user's typed password.

salt is a two-character string chosen from the set [a–zA–Z0–9./]. This string is used to perturb the algorithm in one of 4096 different ways.

By taking the lowest 7 bits of each of the first eight characters of the key, a 56-bit key is obtained. This 56-bit key is used to encrypt repeatedly a constant string (usually a string consisting of all zeros). The returned value points to the encrypted password, a series of 13 printable ASCII characters (the first two characters represent the salt itself). The return value points to static data whose content is overwritten by each call.

Warning

The key space consists of 2**56 equal 7.2e16 possible values. Exhaustive searches of this key space are possible using massively parallel computers. Software, such as crack(1), is available which will search the portion of this key space that is generally used by humans for passwords. Hence, password selection should, at minimum, avoid common words and names. The use of a passwd(1) program that checks for crackable passwords during the selection process is recommended.

The DES algorithm itself has a few quirks which make the use of the crypt(3) interface a very poor choice for anything other than password authentication. If you are planning on using the crypt(3) interface for a cryptography project, don't do it: get a good book on encryption and one of the widely available DES libraries.

RETURN VALUE

A pointer to the encrypted password is returned. On error, NULL is returned.

ERRORS

ENOSYS: The crypt() function was not implemented, probably because of U.S.A. export restrictions.

CONFORMING TO

SVr4, 4.3BSD, POSIX.1-2001

NOTES

Glibc Notes

The glibc2 version of this function has the following additional features. If salt is a character string starting with the three characters "$1$" followed by at most eight characters, and optionally terminated by "$", then instead of using the DES machine, the glibc crypt function uses an MD5-based algorithm, and outputs up to 34 bytes, namely "$1$<salt>$<encoded>", where "<salt>" stands for the up to 8 characters following "$1$" in the salt, and "<encoded>" is a further 22 characters. The characters in "<salt>" and "<encoded>" are drawn from the set [a–zA–Z0–9./]. The entire key is significant here (instead of only the first 8 bytes).

  Michael Haardt (michael@cantor.informatik.rwth.aachen.de) Sat Sep  3 22:00:30 MET DST 1994

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You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public
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Sun Feb 19 21:32:25 1995, faith@cs.unc.edu edited details away

TO DO: This manual page should go more into detail how DES is perturbed,
which string will be encrypted, and what determines the repetition factor.
Is a simple repetition using ECB used, or something more advanced?  I hope
the presented explanations are at least better than nothing, but by no
means enough.

added _XOPEN_SOURCE, aeb, 970705
added GNU MD5 stuff, aeb, 011223

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