First, you should always say on which OS you are running: there is no crypt on my Linux box, but there is one (with the same man page as yours) on Solaris
Second, you say:
For the time being, I have advised him to backtick the shell's crypt command. I know that this is insecure by way of making the password visible to ps, but this will allow him to develop the rest of the script.
but, wait! The man page also says:
Since the key is an argument to the crypt command, it is
potentially visible to users executing ps(1) or a derivative
command. To minimize this possibility, crypt takes care to
destroy any record of the key immediately upon entry. No
doubt the choice of keys and key security are the most
vulnerable aspect of crypt.
so the problem with ps is limited by the program itself. What you should care of instead is that the algorithm is very easy to break, even with brute force attacks:
crypt implements a one-rotor machine designed along the
lines of the German Enigma, but with a 256-element rotor.
Methods of attack on such machines are widely known, thus
crypt provides minimal security.
Therefore, if the contents of the file are really "sensitive", you really should discard vi - x and look for another option alltogether. There are a bunch of modules on CPAN that let you work with pgp: just choose the one that best fits your needs.
Ciao! --bronto
The very nature of Perl to be like natural language--inconsistant and full of dwim and special cases--makes it impossible to know it all without simply memorizing the documentation (which is not complete or totally correct anyway).
--John M. Dlugosz
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