Hello,
I'm trying to teach myself a little more about encryption. I have been messing with the libcrypto++ libraries as well as some code for a SHA-512 algorithm I found here.
http://www.zedwood.com/article/cpp-sha512-function

So, I wrote a small program which compiles and appears to produce accurate hashes compared to a hash calculator I found here.
http://www.fileformat.info/tool/hash...0780yUc%2FMGjT

What I have been trying to determine in vein is what exactly do I have to do to produce the same hash that linux with a SHA-512 login does. I have been comparing to test accounts and have been unable to match the results.
I've read quite a few articles and they are very inconsistant but they seem to indicate I am supposed to be hashing <password> + <salt>, 5000 times.
Could someone explain a little more clearly what the standard hashing procedure for linux is?

The /etc/login.defs file sets some configuration for login authentication like number of iterations, salt and choice of hash. And on most systems login is handled by shadow package. So seeing it's source may help.

Yes I took a look at login defs the other day. Values for hash choice and iterations are not set so I assume they default to SHA-512 and 5000. I know it's SHA-512 for sure because the shadow file hashes begin with "$6$". I'll have a look at the source for the shadow package and see what I come up with.

I hunted around in the shadow-utils source and traced it back to a crypt function which I was unable to locate the source

I found some python code which I don't entirely understand. It appears to be something along the lines of

password+salt+password+???

The source is here near the bottom. Can someone translate?

I'll take a low level language any day. Python may be fast but it's confusing.