NAME
crypt, cryptr - password and data encryption SYNOPSIS
#define XOPENSOURCE /* See featuretestmacros(7) */
#include
char *crypt(const char *key, const char *salt); #define GNUSOURCE /* See featuretestmacros(7) */
#include
char *cryptr(const char *key, const char *salt, struct cryptdata *data); Link with -lcrypt. 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 par‐ allel 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() interface a very poor choice for anything other than password authentication. If you are planning on using the crypt() interface for a cryptography project, don't do it: get a good book on encryption and one of the widely available DES libraries. cryptr() is a reentrant version of crypt(). The structure pointed to by data is used to store result data and bookkeeping information. Other than allocating it, the only thing that the caller should do with
this structure is to set data->initialized to zero before the first call to cryptr(). RETURN VALUE On success, 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. ATTRIBUTES For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see attributes(7). ┌──────────┬───────────────┬──────────────────────┐ │Interface │ Attribute │ Value │ ├──────────┼───────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│crypt() │ Thread safety │ MT-Unsafe race:crypt │ ├──────────┼───────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│cryptr() │ Thread safety │ MT-Safe │ └──────────┴───────────────┴──────────────────────┘ CONFORMING TO
crypt(): SVr4, 4.3BSD, POSIX.1-2001. cryptr() is a GNU extension. NOTES Glibc notes The glibc2 version of this function supports additional encryption algorithms.
If salt is a character string starting with the characters "$id$" fol‐
lowed by a string terminated by "$":
$id$salt$encrypted then instead of using the DES machine, id identifies the encryption method used and this then determines how the rest of the password string is interpreted. The following values of id are supported: ID | Method ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────── 1 | MD5 2a | Blowfish (not in mainline glibc; added in some | Linux distributions)
5 | SHA-256 (since glibc 2.7)
6 | SHA-512 (since glibc 2.7)
So $5$salt$encrypted is an SHA-256 encoded password and
$6$salt$encrypted is an SHA-512 encoded one.
"salt" stands for the up to 16 characters following "$id$" in the salt. The encrypted part of the password string is the actual computed pass‐ word. The size of this string is fixed: MD5 | 22 characters
SHA-256 | 43 characters
SHA-512 | 86 characters The characters in "salt" and "encrypted" are drawn from the set [a–zA–Z0–9./]. In the MD5 and SHA implementations the entire key is significant (instead of only the first 8 bytes in DES). SEE ALSO login(1), passwd(1), encrypt(3), getpass(3), passwd(5) COLOPHON
This page is part of release 3.53 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
2013-06-21 CRYPT(3)