PHP4 and UNIX User Authentication

Anon

I want to write a system that authenticates users against the UNIX user database, but I don't know how to get an encrypted string from the plain-text password to compare against the encrypted string from the user database. Any suggestions?

Anon

The mcrypt() function in PHP can do this for you (check the manual...I'm in a bit of a rush so I can't do it at the moment, but it requires the mcrypt library support in your PHP version).

First you need to know what encryption is used on your unix system.

Most often they use standard DES encryption.

So you'd encrypt the password they give you with DES encryption, then compare the 2 cipher-texts to each other to see if the password is a match.

I wish I remembered where the article was for this...lol.

In the encryption process you'll need to use the same seed as the original, but once you've checked out DES encryption and mcrypt, you'll probably figure that out with it.

Hopefully that semi-answered the question...I'll search for that article when I get back.

nsamaka

did you ever find that article?

Plutarck wrote:

The mcrypt() function in PHP can do this for you (check the manual...I'm in a bit of a rush so I can't do it at the moment, but it requires the mcrypt library support in your PHP version).

First you need to know what encryption is used on your unix system.

Most often they use standard DES encryption.

So you'd encrypt the password they give you with DES encryption, then compare the 2 cipher-texts to each other to see if the password is a match.

I wish I remembered where the article was for this...lol.

In the encryption process you'll need to use the same seed as the original, but once you've checked out DES encryption and mcrypt, you'll probably figure that out with it.

Hopefully that semi-answered the question...I'll search for that article when I get back.

Anon

LOL, I mostly forgot about that. I didn't find the original article (it could of been anywhere), but I did find an excellant one on cryptography in PHP that also deals with general security.

http://www.devshed.com/Books/ProPHP/

Page 5 deals with mcrypt and etc.

This is actually better than the original article.