SETKEY(3C) Standard C Library Functions 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(3C) function. 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

In some environments, decoding may not be implemented. This is related
to U.S. Government restrictions on encryption and decryption routines:
the DES decryption algorithm cannot be exported outside the U.S.A.
Historical practice has been to ship a different version of the
encryption library without the decryption feature in the routines
supplied. Thus the exported version of encrypt() does encoding but not
decoding.


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 | Standard |
+--------------------+-----------------+
|MT-Level | Safe |
+--------------------+-----------------+

SEE ALSO

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


August 14, 2002 SETKEY(3C)