On 4 October 2017 at 15:55, Pierre Labastie <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 04/10/2017 09:46, Richard Melville wrote: > >> To save me time investigating both versions of mkpasswd I wondered if >> anybody had any information to hand as to the key differences between the >> two. >> > mkpasswd from expect is a tcl program, whose algorithm is described in > Chapter 23 of the O'Reilly book "Exploring Expect", that > generates a random password, and optionally assign it to a user. > > mkpasswd from whois does not truly generates a password: it encrypts a > given password into a key. That key can be generated from a password typed > by a user and compared to a database (such as /etc/passwd, or its shadow). > Note that the result is always the same for a given input. > > There is also a "makepasswd" program in debian ftp, which combines both, > and also a pwgen program (on sourceforge), which generates "pronounceable" > (or "easily memorable") passwords. > > Thanks Pierre, that's a really comprehensive answer. From your description I'm assuming that the whois version is just a password hashing algorithm. Richard
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