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FreeBSD Handbook
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10.4 DES, MD5, and Crypt

Parts rewritten and updated by Bill Swingle.

Every user on a UNIX® system has a password associated with their account. It seems obvious that these passwords need to be known only to the user and the actual operating system. In order to keep these passwords secret, they are encrypted with what is known as a ``one-way hash'', that is, they can only be easily encrypted but not decrypted. In other words, what we told you a moment ago was obvious is not even true: the operating system itself does not really know the password. It only knows the encrypted form of the password. The only way to get the ``plain-text'' password is by a brute force search of the space of possible passwords.

Unfortunately the only secure way to encrypt passwords when UNIX came into being was based on DES, the Data Encryption Standard. This was not such a problem for users resident in the US, but since the source code for DES could not be exported outside the US, FreeBSD had to find a way to both comply with US law and retain compatibility with all the other UNIX variants that still used DES.

The solution was to divide up the encryption libraries so that US users could install the DES libraries and use DES but international users still had an encryption method that could be exported abroad. This is how FreeBSD came to use MD5 as its default encryption method. MD5 is believed to be more secure than DES, so installing DES is offered primarily for compatibility reasons.

10.4.1 Recognizing Your Crypt Mechanism

Before FreeBSD 4.4 libcrypt.a was a symbolic link pointing to the library which was used for encryption. FreeBSD 4.4 changed libcrypt.a to provide a configurable password authentication hash library. Currently the library supports DES, MD5 and Blowfish hash functions. By default FreeBSD uses MD5 to encrypt passwords.

It is pretty easy to identify which encryption method FreeBSD is set up to use. Examining the encrypted passwords in the /etc/master.passwd file is one way. Passwords encrypted with the MD5 hash are longer than those encrypted with the DES hash and also begin with the characters $1$. Passwords starting with $2$ are encrypted with the Blowfish hash function. DES password strings do not have any particular identifying characteristics, but they are shorter than MD5 passwords, and are coded in a 64-character alphabet which does not include the $ character, so a relatively short string which does not begin with a dollar sign is very likely a DES password.

The password format used for new passwords is controlled by the passwd_format login capability in /etc/login.conf, which takes values of des, md5 or blf. See the login.conf(5) manual page for more information about login capabilities.

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For questions about FreeBSD, read the documentation before contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.
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