Hashing or MD5

[amit mehta_2]

Hi,

how can one find that which encryption algorithm the system is using for keeping the user password in the /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow file.
Is it
1: Hashing ( which considers only first 8 letters of password)
2: MD5 (Which allows arbitry length passwords)

Thanks,
~amit

[Peter Godron]

Amit,
a thread covering the various platforms:
https://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1080253
This covers your question.

[Matti_Kurkela]

The hashing algorithm uses only characters ".", "/", 0-9, A-Z and a-z. If the encrypted password contains any other characters, the account is locked or it's using some other algorithm.

If the system is using the MD5 algorithm with the passwords, the first characters of each MD5-encrypted password are usually "$1$".

The Wikipedia has some more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypt_(Unix)