Re: Password Encryption

[Anonymous Monk]

Thanks to everyone who contributed

A one-way hash is not going to work in our case as the perl script is supposed to run in a non-interactive mode.

The perl script simply reads the properties file, decrypts the password and then logs into the unix machine.

The basic idea was just to slow someone down. I tried using the some of the well known algorthims (such as DES),
but found the ciphertext contained non-alphabetic/non-numeric characters. Does anyone know how I can restrict the output to just these chars ?

I appreciate doing this is going to make the encryption less secure, but that isn't too important.

[audreyt]

You really want to use pack/unpack to hex-format your ciphertext, so that they are guaranteed to be alphanumeric.

To wit:

use Crypt::CBC;
$cipher = Crypt::CBC->new( {
    key         => 'SomeSecretKeyHere',
    cipher      => 'Rijndael',
});

my $source_text = "This data is hush hush";
my $cipher_text = unpack('H*', $cipher->encrypt($source_text));
my $decrypted   = $cipher->decrypt(pack('H*', $cipher_text));

Also, please do not use the fragile DES cipher, as weak crypto is worse than no crypto. Rijndael is much more secure, almost as fast, and equally easy to use.

Thanks,
/Autrijus/