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I see a hashed passphrase like the following in /etc/shadow. I don't quite understand its format.

$y$j9T$F5Jx5fExrKuPp53xLKQ..1$X3DX6M94c7o.9agCG9G317fhZg9SqC.5i5rd.RhAtQ7

It is made of four parts as shown below. According to crypt(5), y means yescrypt.

https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/libcrypt-dev/crypt.5.en.html

- y
- j9T
- F5Jx5fExrKuPp53xLKQ..1
- X3DX6M94c7o.9agCG9G317fhZg9SqC.5i5rd.RhAtQ7

What is the meaning of the last three parts?

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    Hard to believe that many distributions have switched to yescript as the default hashing algorithm, and none of them describe the param part, or why j9T is used there and why and what it means.
    – Stéphane Chazelas
    Jun 27, 2022 at 15:03
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    Here is an answer I provided to another, similar, question on the topic. It takes a deep dive of the yescrypt format and includes each of the fields.
    – NULLx
    Nov 12, 2022 at 17:31

1 Answer 1

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The answer to "What is the meaning of the parts of the crypt(3) function":

  • id
  • param
  • salt
  • hash

As explained more in detail here.

Regarding the new yescrypt "passphrase hashing scheme", the meaning of the second field can be understood by reading this, and if you want even more information, you can also read the yescrypt v2 specification.

I did some more research, and it seems that the hashing is happening in the function yescrypt_r. You can see the different parameters definitions in the code.
In the case the id is 7, N is set to 2^x where x is the number in the first digit of param, and then r and p are both parsed using the function decode64_uint32_fixed from the rest of the param field.
In all other cases (i.e. only when id is y, since the function checks the value of id and returns if it isn't 7 or y), the source conditionally sets various different parameters, with a block of code written in such a way that I feel trying to understand it would go against the wishes of the original author. So I leave it as an exercise for the reader.

In that same file, The function yescrypt that follows it exposes a simpler interface, similar to the one of crypt(3).

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    So as far as I understand it, the password is hashed not encrypted.
    – not2savvy
    Mar 29, 2021 at 7:00
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    @user15502206 the sentence that explains the four parts isn't in the man, but in the Wikipedia link. man pages are written by people who are perfectly familiar about a topic for people who are perfectly familiar about that topic; so for learning, I'd rank their value lower than the actual source code. The exact sentence is: "The format is defined as: $<id>[$<param>=<value>(,<param>=<value>)*][$<salt>[$<hash>]] ". The filippo.io blog only details the logical scrypt parameters, not how the yescrypt ones are implemented in crypt(3). So, it is useful, but not directly.
    – 7heo.tk
    Mar 29, 2021 at 17:02
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    @not2savvy, yep, you don't encrypt passwords, since it's not necessary to turn them back to plain text, so you don't want that to be easily done. See e.g. security.stackexchange.com/q/211/118457
    – ilkkachu
    Mar 29, 2021 at 18:39
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    That obfuscated encoding of the parameters almost feels like a good reason not to use that hash...
    – ilkkachu
    Mar 29, 2021 at 18:39
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    @not2savvy The very first version of crypt() actually did encrypt a fixed string with your password, hence this name which does not reflect today's processing.
    – xhienne
    Mar 29, 2021 at 18:49

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