The friendly crypt() function that you're likely to find in any *nix operating system, applies a (hopefully) cryptographically strong hashing function to the supplied password and salt. The general idea behind this, is converting the cleartext password you gave it into a hash (some people uses the term signature).

With that hash, it is computationaly infeasible to find a strong-enough password. What this means in lay man terms, is that it is very hard to learn the original (cleartext) password out of the hash and salt that lives in /etc/passwd.

I know of two common implementations of the crypt() functions: The DES based and the MD5 based. Newer systems tend to use the MD5 based crypt(), for a number of reasons.

Note that the MD5-based crypt() is not the same as obtaining the hash of your password with Digest::MD5 or similar. The algorythm used internally by the MD5-based crypt() uses a number of transformations in which the MD5 algorythm is used, but is very different.

Crypt::PasswdMD5 implements this algorythm in Perl, allowing you to reproduce the result of said crypt() functions in non-*nix systems or systems without a compatible crypt() implementation.

Regards.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: MD5? by fokat
in thread How to use MD5? by pmme

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.