From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Sep 20 13:18:37 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix, from userid 758) id 1EFAD14BD2; Mon, 20 Sep 1999 13:18:34 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 102FD1CD58C; Mon, 20 Sep 1999 13:18:33 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kris@hub.freebsd.org) Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 13:18:33 -0700 (PDT) From: Kris Kennaway To: skalir scalar Cc: freebsd-security@freebsd.org, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: MD5 vs. DES In-Reply-To: <19990920200232.66297.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Mon, 20 Sep 1999, skalir scalar wrote: > I am looking for someinfomation or an 'HOWTO' on installing MD5 > lib's versus using DES for like the password files and the such > like. any info would be great. thanks. If you don't select DES libraries at install-time (or install them some other way), then you get MD5 passwords, which are arguably "better" in many ways. If you do install DES libraries, you automatically get DES passwords. You can change this with a bit of hackery in libcrypt - I have a mostly-completed replacement to libcrypt which fixes this but it may be some time before I can get it committed. Moral: don't install the DES libraries unless you need them. "Installed" means which copy is pointed to by the libcrypt.* symlinks in /usr/lib - to switch between DES and MD5 if you have them both then you just re-point the symlinks. If you have DES libraries installed, your system can understand both existing DES and MD5 passwords, but if you have MD5 then you can't use existing DES passwords. Kris To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message