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man pages section 3: Basic Library Functions

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Updated: Wednesday, July 27, 2022
 
 

setkey(3C)

Name

setkey - set encoding key

Synopsis

#include <stdlib.h>

void setkey(const char *key);

Description

The setkey() function provides (rather primitive) access to the hashing algorithm employed by the crypt_unix(7) algorithm. The argument of setkey() is an array of length 64 bytes containing only the bytes with numerical value of 0 and 1. If this string is divided into groups of 8, the low-order bit in each group is ignored; this gives a 56-bit key which is used by the algorithm. This is the key that will be used with the algorithm to encode a string block passed to encrypt(3C).

Return Values

No values are returned.

Errors

The setkey() function will fail if:

ENOSYS

The functionality is not supported on this implementation.

Usage

The DES standard was officially withdrawn by NIST in 2005, and the algorithm is no longer recommended for modern usage. Oracle Solaris may remove the remaining support for single-DES in a future update. Please upgrade your applications to use more modern ciphers and hashes and longer key lengths, such as those provided by openssl(7).

Because setkey() does not return a value, applications wishing to check for errors should set errno to 0, call setkey(), then test errno and, if it is non-zero, assume an error has occurred.

Attributes

See attributes(7) for descriptions of the following attributes:

ATTRIBUTE TYPE
ATTRIBUTE VALUE
Interface Stability
Obsolete Committed
MT-Level
Safe
Standard

See Also

crypt(3C), encrypt(3C), attributes(7), crypt_unix(7), standards(7), openssl(7)