Re: [Chicken-users] Crypt egg build error

[Peter Bex]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 07:18:26AM -0600, Matt Gushee wrote:
> Hi, Peter--
> 
> On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 4:02 AM, Peter Bex <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > The reason it's erroring out is probably because your libc's crypt()
> > returns NULL for unsupported setting strings, whereas some other crypt()
> > implementations return bogus strings.
> >
> > Could you please try the attached patch and let me know if this fixes
> > it for you, so I can make a new release?
> 
> Yes, that works. Thank you!

Excellent, thanks for the feedback.  I've just released crypt 0.4.1 which
contains this bugfix.

> By the way: since this egg is an interface to "the Unix crypt()
> function," does that mean it does not work on Windows?

Well, it comes shipped with fallback implementations for when a
particular type of crypt implementation is not provided by the host
operating system.  I guess it should be possible to support crypt()
even if there is no host implementation whatsoever, but this has not
been tested.

I don't have Windows, so I can't test it, but if you can make a patch
which adds support I'll do my best to avoid breaking it.

> Also, I have
> seen that some seemingly-knowledgeable people believe that bcrypt is
> one of the better hashing methods.

That's right, it's one of the most CPU-heavy implementations, which is a
good thing because it makes life hard for an attacker.  It is also said to
be particularly hard to fully implement in hardware, which means
special-purpose hardware won't be able to accelerate this much beyond what
a normal CPU can do.

> But this crypt is not related to bcrypt, is it?

No offense, but it sounds like you haven't read the manual.  I've put
quite some effort into explaining what exactly crypt is and how it is
implemented, and why a library supporting modular crypt is a better idea
than a special-purpose library that can only deal with bcrypt.

You can find it here: http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/crypt
If it is somehow unclear or things are missing, please let me know so I
can improve the manual.

Cheers,
Peter
-- 
http://www.more-magic.net