[ILUG] What's the story with MD5 & crypt()

[Jakma, Paul]

> (I assume the MD5 checksum & encryption thingy does this).
> So how the hell do you crypt() a user supplied password and 
> compare to the
> MD5 password length ?
> is there an md5crypt ? or am I waaayyyyy off track ?
> 

iirc, crypt() on RH6 handles both DES and MD5 encryption. I don't have a RH6
system handy, so i don't know how it's specified. But it's the same
function. Not sure if it's part of libc or libcrypt.

> And while I'm at it . . . . .
> Surely someone has built an authentication library that will 
> run on any
> UNIX, that
> has the same interface for checking passwords, regardless of the
> authentication method.

that would be DES then. You can take an encrypted password from OSF/1..
solaris, etc.. and plug it into any other unix box's password file which is
configured to use DES. NISv2 wouldn't work otherwise.


> As far as I know pam is only on linux, and at that only on some
> distributions.
> 

PAM is used on solaris aswell i believe (at least linux-pam is modeled on
Sun's pam project). IIRC there is also some movement to make pam part of a
UnixXX standard. Not sure though..

>