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Not at all. The problem was that the crypto for the same library on two different OSes was implemented differently, which lead to an error encrypting on Linux and decrypting on Solaris. Ironically, this would have been avoided if they had rolled their own.

It is an instance of "make sure you have backups when deploying to production"

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Not the crypto, but rather the getpass() function, which simply reads a password from standard input without echoing it.

Since the function uses a static buffer, there is a limit on the password length, which apparently on Solaris was set to the absurdly low value of 8 (glibc uses a more reasonable value: 8192).

Thanks for the correction. I assumed getpass() did some crypto work in addition to just getting raw keyboard input.

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