blf uses only 2^4 round for passwd encoding?! [Re: Default password hash]

[RW]

On Mon, 11 Jun 2012 00:37:30 +0200
Oliver Pinter wrote:


> 16 rounds in 2012? It is not to weak?!

It's hard to say. Remember that blowfish was designed as a cipher not
a hash. It's designed to be fast, but to still resist known plaintext
attacks at the beginning of the ciphertext. It was also designed to
work directly with a passphrase because there was a history of
programmers abusing DES by using simple ascii passwords as keys. 

For these reasons initialization is deliberately expensive,
effectively it already contains an element of passphrase hashing.