Re: [9fans] passtokey question

["Roman V. Shaposhnick" <vugluskr@unicorn.math.spbu.ru>]

On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 at 10:25:26PM -0500, presotto@plan9.bell-labs.com wrote:
> The original passtokey took a (at most) 8 byte key and turned it into
> a 56 bit DES key.  The easiest way to do it was to throw out the
> high order bit since it conveyed no information in ASCII, a 7 bit
> encodeing.  It survived our excursion into UTF encoding mostly
> by inertia and a desire not to retype everyone's keys into the
> auth server should we do something else, like take 56 bits of the
> sha1 encoding of the key + a salt.

Thanks. That explains the first part very nicely, but what about the
second part, where you're using key built-so-far to econde the rest
of the given password over and over again ? Is there something special
about this approach, or is it there by a mere chance ?

Thanks,
Roman.

P.S. Pardon my ignorance, but do you know about any other softwre that
has something similat to passtokey ?