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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ERRORS | ATTRIBUTES | CONFORMING TO | NOTES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
CRYPT(3) Linux Programmer's Manual CRYPT(3)
crypt, crypt_r - password and data encryption
#define _XOPEN_SOURCE /* See feature_test_macros(7) */
#include <unistd.h>
char *crypt(const char *key, const char *salt);
#define _GNU_SOURCE /* See feature_test_macros(7) */
#include <crypt.h>
char *crypt_r(const char *key, const char *salt,
struct crypt_data *data);
Link with -lcrypt.
crypt() is the password encryption function. It is based on the Data
Encryption Standard algorithm with variations intended (among other
things) to discourage use of hardware implementations of a key
search.
key is a user's typed password.
salt is a two-character string chosen from the set [a-zA-Z0-9./].
This string is used to perturb the algorithm in one of 4096 different
ways.
By taking the lowest 7 bits of each of the first eight characters of
the key, a 56-bit key is obtained. This 56-bit key is used to
encrypt repeatedly a constant string (usually a string consisting of
all zeros). The returned value points to the encrypted password, a
series of 13 printable ASCII characters (the first two characters
represent the salt itself). The return value points to static data
whose content is overwritten by each call.
Warning: the key space consists of 2**56 equal 7.2e16 possible
values. Exhaustive searches of this key space are possible using
massively parallel computers. Software, such as crack(1), is
available which will search the portion of this key space that is
generally used by humans for passwords. Hence, password selection
should, at minimum, avoid common words and names. The use of a
passwd(1) program that checks for crackable passwords during the
selection process is recommended.
The DES algorithm itself has a few quirks which make the use of the
crypt() interface a very poor choice for anything other than password
authentication. If you are planning on using the crypt() interface
for a cryptography project, don't do it: get a good book on
encryption and one of the widely available DES libraries.
crypt_r() is a reentrant version of crypt(). The structure pointed
to by data is used to store result data and bookkeeping information.
Other than allocating it, the only thing that the caller should do
with this structure is to set data->initialized to zero before the
first call to crypt_r().
On success, a pointer to the encrypted password is returned. On
error, NULL is returned.
EINVAL salt has the wrong format.
ENOSYS The crypt() function was not implemented, probably because of
U.S.A. export restrictions.
EPERM /proc/sys/crypto/fips_enabled has a nonzero value, and an
attempt was made to use a weak encryption type, such as DES.
For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see
attributes(7).
┌──────────┬───────────────┬──────────────────────┐
│Interface │ Attribute │ Value │
├──────────┼───────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│crypt() │ Thread safety │ MT-Unsafe race:crypt │
├──────────┼───────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│crypt_r() │ Thread safety │ MT-Safe │
└──────────┴───────────────┴──────────────────────┘
crypt(): POSIX.1-2001, POSIX.1-2008, SVr4, 4.3BSD. crypt_r() is a
GNU extension.
Glibc notes
The glibc2 version of this function supports additional encryption
algorithms.
If salt is a character string starting with the characters "$id$"
followed by a string terminated by "$":
$id$salt$encrypted
then instead of using the DES machine, id identifies the encryption
method used and this then determines how the rest of the password
string is interpreted. The following values of id are supported:
ID | Method
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
1 | MD5
2a | Blowfish (not in mainline glibc; added in some
| Linux distributions)
5 | SHA-256 (since glibc 2.7)
6 | SHA-512 (since glibc 2.7)
So $5$salt$encrypted is an SHA-256 encoded password and
$6$salt$encrypted is an SHA-512 encoded one.
"salt" stands for the up to 16 characters following "$id$" in the
salt. The encrypted part of the password string is the actual
computed password. The size of this string is fixed:
MD5 | 22 characters
SHA-256 | 43 characters
SHA-512 | 86 characters
The characters in "salt" and "encrypted" are drawn from the set
[a-zA-Z0-9./]. In the MD5 and SHA implementations the entire key is
significant (instead of only the first 8 bytes in DES).
login(1), passwd(1), encrypt(3), getpass(3), passwd(5)
This page is part of release 4.12 of the Linux man-pages project. A
description of the project, information about reporting bugs, and the
latest version of this page, can be found at
https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
2015-08-08 CRYPT(3)
Pages that refer to this page: des_crypt(3), encrypt(3), getpass(3), key_setsecret(3), gshadow(5), passwd(5), passwd(5@@shadow-utils), shadow(5), slapd.conf(5), slapd-config(5), groupadd(8), groupmod(8), pam_unix(8), pam_userdb(8), slappasswd(8), useradd(8), usermod(8)