Promotion of cryptography

[Ian G Batten]

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You write:
> This is its employment in the crypt(3) algorithm that is used to encrypt
> passwords on many versions of the Unix operating system, the most numerous
> examples probably being SunOS and HP-UX.=20

=46rom my laptop (I changed one byte):

igb:$1$rr9J6Ed8$T/odJygTKgfxNxoRhfTnV1:101:10:Ian G Batten:/home/igb:/bin/b=
ash

The use of MD5 is hardly rocket science.

> For reasons explained below it is important that in this application DES
> is dropped in favour of a password encryption algorithm that allows
> passwords (ie. keys) to be much longer than 8 (eight) characters and which
> is also computationally expensive so that attempts at key searches are
> much more costly than at present.=20

MD5, for example.  Or SHA-1.  Obviously you will want to has the
username, the password, the uid and anything else that comes to hand to
reduce the effectiveness of dictionary searches.

> [Note that in a networked Unix environment, passwords can also be
>  vulnerable to "sniffers" and similar software because they normally
>  traverse the network unencrypted!]

Use ssh.

ian

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