You really want to use a module for this:

• Crypt::PasswdMD5 -- Puts the password through an MD5sum. Be warned that MD5 makes a lot of people nervous and probably shouldn't be used for new things.
• Apache::Htpasswd -- Compatible with Apache's .htpasswd format, though you don't have to be using Apache to use it.

If you're not familer with the term "salt", just know that it is a random value stored in plaintext with the password. It's there to make brute-force cracking on the password file a lot harder. (A recent program claiming that it could break most WinNT/2k/XP passwords in a few minutes works because Microsoft didn't use salt).

If you're not familer with cryptography in general, I recommend reading through the Cryptogram (external link) archives before using it a lot. Just slapping a module from the Crypt:: namespace isn't enough--you have to use it correctly. As hard as making a secure cipher is, it turns out that it's the easy part. At least creating ciphers has thousands of years of mathmatics behind it so that its security can be anyalized mathmatically. Even a code with theoretically perfect security (like the one-time pad) can be utterly broken if you don't manage your keys correctly, or you use a bad random number generator, or you leave a copy of the plaintext laying around, or . . .

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

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