john-users - Re: salt and passkey different ?

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Date: Sun, 3 Feb 2008 16:46:31 +0300
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: john-users@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: salt and passkey different ?

websiteaccess - you have obviously posted this without much thought -
you even failed to formulate your one-line question correctly, let alone
do a Google search on "passkey" to find out that it's not a generic
term.  Please show more respect for other people's time next time you
post.  Anyway, I'll address your question now that it is on the list:

On Sat, Feb 02, 2008 at 04:41:59PM +0100, websiteaccess wrote:
>  Is "salt" and "passkey" are same name for the same thing ?

No, in general they are not the same thing.

"salt" is a generic and widely-recognized term in cryptography.  You
probably know what it means (roughly), but those who don't may refer to
my older posting on what salts are:

	http://www.openwall.com/lists/john-users/2005/12/18/1

and to other material referenced from that post, as well as to the
Wikipedia article:

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_%28cryptography%29

"passkey" is not a generic term, so it is meaningless outside of a
context.  You may find it used when describing specific applications,
and it has entirely different meanings in different contexts.  In fact,
I was not able to quickly find a context where "passkey" would be
synonymous to "salt".

-- 
Alexander Peslyak <solar at openwall.com>
GPG key ID: 5B341F15  fp: B3FB 63F4 D7A3 BCCC 6F6E  FC55 A2FC 027C 5B34 1F15
http://www.openwall.com - bringing security into open computing environments

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