First, you should always say on which OS you are running: there is no crypt on my Linux box, but there is one (with the same man page as yours) on Solaris

Second, you say:

For the time being, I have advised him to backtick the shell's crypt command. I know that this is insecure by way of making the password visible to ps, but this will allow him to develop the rest of the script.

but, wait! The man page also says:

     Since the key is an argument to the  crypt  command,  it  is
     potentially visible to users executing ps(1) or a derivative
     command.  To minimize this possibility, crypt takes care  to
     destroy  any  record  of the key immediately upon entry.  No
     doubt the choice of keys  and  key  security  are  the  most
     vulnerable aspect of crypt.

[download]

so the problem with ps is limited by the program itself. What you should care of instead is that the algorithm is very easy to break, even with brute force attacks:

     crypt implements a  one-rotor  machine  designed  along  the
     lines  of  the  German Enigma, but with a 256-element rotor.
     Methods of attack on such machines are  widely  known,  thus
     crypt provides minimal security.

[download]

Therefore, if the contents of the file are really "sensitive", you really should discard vi - x and look for another option alltogether. There are a bunch of modules on CPAN that let you work with pgp: just choose the one that best fits your needs.

Ciao!
--bronto

The very nature of Perl to be like natural language--inconsistant and full of dwim and special cases--makes it impossible to know it all without simply memorizing the documentation (which is not complete or totally correct anyway).
--John M. Dlugosz

In reply to Re^3: How to decrypt a file encrypted with vi -x or shell crypt by bronto
in thread How to decrypt a file encrypted with vi -x or shell crypt by rinceWind

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