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crypt() default salt
Maintainer: Mark Dominus <mjd@plover.com> Date: 11 Sep 2000 Last Modified: 23 Sep 2000 Mailing List: perl6-language@perl.org Number: 208 Version: 4 Status: Frozen
A frequently-asked question is how to generate an appropaite random salt for password encryption. I propose that Perl generate the salt automatically if the salt argument is omitted in the call to crypt().
At present, crypt() requires two arguments:
crypt PLAINTEXT,SALT
It then passes these arguments directly to the C library crypt() function.
When encrypting a new password, the programmer is required to generate a salt at random:
@letters = ('A' .. 'Z', 'a' .. 'z', '0' .. '9', '/', '.');
$salt = $letters[rand@letters] . $letters[rand@letters];
$passwd = crypt($passwd, $salt);
This is inconvenient and nonportable. It's also nonobvious: people frequently ask in the newsgroups how to do it. I propose that if the SALT argument is omitted, Perl should generate an appropriate salt internally and use that.
$passwd = crypt($passwd); # Same as above
On systems where the password format is different, Perl can do the appropriate thing.
For the standard DES-based crypt, the implementation is straightforward trivial. Perl already has many functions that take an optional argument, and the C internals of the random-salt generator are well-known.
Details will vary for systems using alternative password hashing schemes. On some systems, no salt need be generated. These can be taken care of with a suitably ifdef'ed section of code if necessary.
If the random number generator has not yet been seeded, Perl should seed it.
Michael Schwern has developed a partial demonstration implementation in pure Perl. It is available from
www.pobox.com
It has been suggested that crypt() should have a private random
number generator, to avoid interfering with the sequence of numbers
produced by rand(). This would significantly complicate the
implementation, and I believe it is probably unnecessary. See the
REFERENCES for details.
crypt() with only one argument is presently a compile-time error,
so there are probably few translation issues. The meaning of this
program will change:
$" = ', ';
$code = "crypt(@ARGV)";
eval $code;
die $@ if $@;
But I don't think this is anything to worry about---it should fall into the "other 5%" category.
perlfunc manpage for discussion of crypt()
crypt(3)