Crypt

A crypt (from Latin crypta "vault") is a stone chamber beneath the floor of a church or other building. It typically contains coffins, sarcophagi, or religious relics.

Originally, crypts were typically found below the main apse of a church, such as at the Abbey of Saint-Germain en Auxerre, but were later located beneath chancel, naves and transepts as well. Occasionally churches were raised high to accommodate a crypt at the ground level, such as St Michael's Church in Hildesheim, Germany.

Etymology

"Crypt" developed as an alternative form of the Latin crypta "vault" as it was carried over into Late Latin, and came to refer to the ritual rooms found underneath church buildings. It also served as a vault for storing important and/or sacred items.

"Crypta", however, is also the female form of crypto "hidden". The earliest known origin of both is in the Ancient Greek κρύπτω (krupto/krypto), the first person singular indicative of the verb "to conceal, to hide".

Development

First known in the early Christian period, in particular North Africa at Chlef and Djemila in Algeria, and Byzantium at Saint John Studio in Constantinople. Where Christian churches have been built over mithraea, the mithraeum has often been adapted to serve as a crypt.

Crypt (Unix)

In Unix computing, crypt is the name of a utility program used for encryption, that is largely obsolete.

History

Robert Morris wrote crypt, which first appeared in Version 3 Unix, to encourage codebreaking experiments; Morris himself broke crypt by hand. Dennis M. Ritchie automated decryption with a method by James Reeds, and an improved version appeared in Version 7 which Reeds and Peter J. Weinberger also broke.

Relationship to password hash function

There is also a Unix password hash function called crypt. Though both are used for encrypting data in some sense, they are otherwise essentially unrelated. To distinguish between the two, writers often refer to the utility program as crypt(1), because it is documented in section 1 of the Unix manual pages, and refer to the password hash function as crypt(3), because its documentation is in manual section 3.

Command filter crypt(1)

crypt(1) is a simple command to encrypt or decrypt data. Usually this is used as a filter, and it has traditionally been implemented using an algorithm based on the Enigma machine. It is considered to be far too cryptographically weak to provide any security against brute force attacks by modern, commodity personal computers.

Crypt (disambiguation)

Crypt may refer to:

In medicine:

In botany: