🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <18742@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> rotondo@ernie.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Scott Rotondo) writes:
>DES is used in the Unix crypt(3) function (NOT crypt(1)) to encode passwords.
>The algorithm is DES except that the initial permutation is altered to one
>of 4096 possibilities by the first two characters in the passwd file entry,
>known as "salt" bits.  This makes it impossible to encrypt common words
>and then check them against all the passwd entries looking for a match.
>

You are correct, however I would add that there exist implimentations of
crypt(3) that are fairly fast (Bob Baldwin's fdes) -- when I tried it, it
could run through about 50,000 calls to fcrypt(3) (on an 11/780) in
about 45 minutes. Given a few days, someone with bad intentions could
easily check a list of "common" words against every user (each word
would have to be re-encrypted for every user).  The same is true for the
password-encryption on VMS, except that the VMS routines (that were posted
to the net) go through about 50k words in ~11 minutes.

					--robert