Passwords hashing
The crypt
function to hash (originally encrypt) password dates back to the
70s, and used some rotor-based encryption, à la Enigma. Wikipedia has a nice
article
about its complete history.
In February 1997, Niels Provos switched
OpenBSD’s crypt
from
DES to a
BLOWFISH based hashing
system that he
invented with
David Mazieres, called bcrypt
. It landed
in OpenBSD 2.1.
In 2007, Linux switched from MD5 to SHA-512, thanks to Ulrich Drepper, and is still using it as default hashing scheme as of 2019.
bcrypt
is now widely used to hash passwords,
and is supported by every major unix-like (FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux, Solaris, …),
is implemented in various languages, …
It’s a pretty strong algorithm, even by today’s criteria, and had a broad influence on how the world is storing passwords.