Encrypted Password Portability Between releases

James Moser james at ytjameslee.com
Sun Oct 5 17:47:13 PDT 2003


Hey everyone...  cryptography is not really my strong point and I'm 
trying to do something I thought should have been fairly easy.  We have 
a number of machines running various versions of FreeBSD from 
4.7-RELEASE to 4.8-STABLE.  Our password files for our users are 
generated through passwords which are currently being stored in plain 
text. I wish to encrypt these on a central server and store them in the 
database for better security, however I'm running into some problems.  
It appears to work on some systems and some systems it does not.  I have 
tried DES and MD5 encryption.

Most of these systems have been upgraded from much earlier releases of 
the 4 branch, and the passwords of users not generated from the database 
seem to have been find after each upgrade.  So my question is, what am I 
doing wrong?  Is there a way to encrypt a password on one system and 
have it work on all FreeBSD machines no matter what release its running? 
If I encrypt on a 4.7 box will it work on a 4.8 system, just not the 
other way around?

Thanks for any help of information you can provide.

Sincerely,
James Moser




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