What is the encryption used for /etc/passwd FreeBSD 4.9

wayloud · 09-05-2004, 12:37 AM

According to documentation my FreeBSD 4.9 system should be using MD5 encryption because the password field starts with $1$. However if I create a user with a password of "bob123" the hash entered in /etc/passwd doesn't match what I get when I simply do:

md5 -s bob123

Any thoughts? How can I veryify what encryption is being used, and is there a way to do it on the command line? Like in OpenBSD I can simply:

encrypt bob123

and I get output that is the same as what is in /etc/passwd.

Thanks

chort · 09-05-2004, 01:59 AM

Have you read the OpenBSD man page for encrypt(1)? The reason I ask is because it's doing more than just a one-way hashing algorithm. Read the man page to see why it's not that simple.

For FreeBSD you would need to also use the salt when md5'ing the password, but you have to remember it's crypt MD5 and not simply digest MD5. You won't get that behavior by using md5sum, you need to use something like the PERL module Crypt::PasswdMD5 or a call to the system function crypt(3) using the correct magic string to indicate hash type.