phpass

Overview ¶

Package phpass verifies and computes "portable PHP" password hashes — the phpass scheme used by WordPress ($P$…) and phpBB3 ($H$…). WordPress is the most-deployed CMS, so its user-table hashes are among the most common offline- crack targets (hashcat mode 400); this is the compute/verify side, and hash_crack gains a phpass dictionary mode.

Wrap-vs-native judgement ¶

Native. phpass is an iterated MD5 (h = MD5(salt|pw); then h = MD5(h|pw) for 2^N rounds) finished with phpass's own base64 — a few dozen lines over crypto/md5; there is nothing to wrap.

Verifiable / no confidently-wrong output ¶

The round count encoding, the MD5 loop, and the phpass base64 were confirmed against the reference passlib library (an independent oracle). Verify constant-time-compares the recomputed setting string, so a wrong password is reported as such, never asserted to match. A hash whose embedded cost is absurd (> 2^24 rounds) is rejected rather than allowed to hang.

Covered / deferred ¶

Covered: phpass $P$ (WordPress) and $H$ (phpBB3), verify + compute. The older non-portable WordPress MD5 and the bcrypt-backed $wp$ hashes are out of scope (the latter is the bcrypt tool's domain).