Re: Blowfish encryption for local passwords

[Thomas M Steenholdt <tmus tmus dk>]

Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 03, 2006 at 10:03:24PM +0100, Thomas M Steenholdt wrote:
> > From my understanding, Blowfish provides encryption far superior to 
> > even MD5 and there should no license problems.
>
> Isn't this apples and oranges?

Not really.

We want to be able to encrypt our local passwords in a way that is 
impossible to crack and take the longest to brute force. Blowfish seems 
to be the winner here (from what I know, at least).


Performance table, grabbed from bz#173002, comment#2:

--- snip ---

http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2004-06/pdfs/alexander.pdf

Particularly noticeable is the below benchmark table, running "John the 
ripper"
on a P4 2.4GHz with 512M of RAM. Slower is better!
---------------------------------------------------
| Unix crypt ()            | 249467 hashes/second |
| BSDI DES (x725)          |   9618 hashes/second |
| FreeBSD MD5              |   4452 hashes/second |
| OpenBSD Blowfish         |    335 hashes/second |
| Kerberos AFS DES (short) | 244907 hashes/second |
| Kerberos AFS DES (long)  | 435745 hashes/second |
| Windows NT LanMan DES    | 628234 hashes/second |
---------------------------------------------------

--- snip ---

/Thomas