[Linux-disciples] Shadow passwords and NIS

[Stephen R Laniel]

On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 07:35:56PM -0400, Dylan Thurston wrote:
> Why use shadow passwords at all?  If you use md5 passwords and everyone
> uses secure passwords (as they should anyway), it's still secure.

Ah. Here's where I discover my ignorance. See, I thought
that *all* Linux passwords were shadow passwords. By 'shadow
password', I thought we just meant 'a file that stores
encrypted copies of the passwords on disk.' And since no one
stores cleartext passwords on disk, I thought that we were
all in some way or another using shadow passwords.

So: where should I read about how passwords *actually* work?
'apropos md5' only gives the list below, which doesn't seem
to be what I want.

::md5::md5 (3tcl) [md5] - Perform md5 hashing
Digest::HMAC_MD5 (3pm) - Keyed-Hashing for Message Authentication
Digest::MD5 (3perl)  - Perl interface to the MD5 Algorithm
grub-md5-crypt (8)   - Encrypt a password in MD5 format
md5 (1ssl) [dgst]    - message digests
md5 (3tcl)           - Perform md5 hashing
md5sum (1)           - generates or checks MD5 message digests
md5sum.textutils (1) - compute and check MD5 message digest

-- 
``We need more bunnies listening to The Connection with
  Dick Gordon and less wars in Iraq.''
 -Fafblog!, http://shorl.com/byhapedegradra

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