From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Sep 21 15:54:45 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail.rdc1.tn.home.com (ha1.rdc1.tn.home.com [24.2.7.66]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A52C8154E7 for ; Tue, 21 Sep 1999 15:54:43 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from williamsl@home.com) Received: from RELIABLE ([24.4.115.31]) by mail.rdc1.tn.home.com (InterMail v4.01.01.00 201-229-111) with ESMTP id <19990921225442.RTSJ13005.mail.rdc1.tn.home.com@RELIABLE> for ; Tue, 21 Sep 1999 15:54:42 -0700 Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1999 18:46:05 -0400 From: Ben Williams X-Mailer: The Bat! (v1.34a) UNREG / CD5BF9353B3B7091 X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Message-ID: <16782.990921@home.com> To: FreeBSD questions Subject: Re[2]: How does this password encryption stuff work? In-reply-To: <19990920234054.A13838@converging.net> References: <19990920234054.A13838@converging.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > Are you saying that if the password was 'secure' that the key would be > 'se'? I have tried that but have not had any luck as of yet. It seems that /snip/ The answer to that is both "yes" and "no." Read on. >> The "key" is the first two characters of the plain text password. Actually the "key" is the first two characters of the encrypted password. This was done IIRC because the crypt() algorithm uses a one-way encryption (plain-text -> encrypted) with variable keys and that was the only sensible way to keep the key around to use next time the user logged in. >> >> Dan >> -- /snip/ -- Ben To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message