iPAQ Password Encryption Tool

The folks who built the Familiar GNU/linux distribution did a terrific job of building a fully-functional system that runs out of the box. Of course, it does take some tweaking, and the environment is necessarily restricted due to the lack of space. One of the problems I encountered was the need to change the root password early in the configuration process. I wanted to get it done before I enabled the network. I found that there is no passwd command, and the doc's recommend that one use perl to encrypt the password like so:

perl -e 'print crypt("mypassword","na"),"\n";'

This is what I did, but it occurred to me that someday, I might wish to change the password, and not have a network or terminal attached. Thus, this tiny wrapper around the C library crypt(3) function was written. It's only 3kb, so doesn't take up much space. The original intent was to call it from a nice python gui, but that'll have to wait 'til I get some more time. Meanwhile, the program can be used to generate encrypted passwords that can be inserted into the password file with a text editor.

Usage is simple. The program expects 2 arguments, the password and a two character salt. The salt can be uppercase or lowercase letters, digits, a period, or a slash ([a-z][A-Z][0-9][./]). Called without arguments, it will provide a terse synopsis. An example of use would be:

~ # ./enc
usage: enc password salt
~ # ./enc mypassword T1
T161c85.kt3FE

You can grab the program and the source code here:

• enc [3224 bytes]
• enc.c [324 bytes]

Copyright (c) 2002 dave w capella, grox.net - All rights reserved. This software is distributed under the terms of the GNU Public License. A copy of the license may be obtained from the GNU web site.

More iPAQ stuff here

Enjoy!
...dave