HP-UX Reference (11i v2 04/09) - 3 Library Functions A-M (vol 6)

bigcrypt(3C) bigcrypt(3C)

NAME

bigcrypt - generate hashing encryption on large strings

SYNOPSIS

#include <hpsecurity.h>

#include <prot.h>

char *bigcrypt(char *key, char *salt);

DESCRIPTION

bigcrypt() acts like crypt(3C), but handles much larger strings.

bigcrypt takes the segments of

cleartext and encrypts them individually, at ﬁrst using the salt passed in, and then using the ﬁrst two

characters of the previous encrypted segment as the salt for the next segment. This avoids duplicated

ciphertext chunks when the password characters are repeated, so that the encryption of a segment

involves the encryption of all the previous segments.

Each ciphertext segment is concatenated, with the salt at the beginning, to form the entire encrypted

string.

AUTHOR

bigcrypt was developed by HP.