The UnixCrypt Delphi / C++ Builder was designed to be a password encryption component. It is based on the Data Encryption Standard algorythm with variations intended (among other things) to discourage use of hardware implementations of a key search. Key property is a user's typed password. Salt is a two characters string chosen from the set [a-zA-Z0-9./]. This string is used to perturb the algo-encrypt repeatedly a constant string (usually a string consisting of all zeros). The returned value (Result property) is the encrypted password, a series of 13 printable ASCII characters (the first two characters represent the salt itsef). Drop component on your form, specify password in Key property, put any two cahracters to Salt property and get encrypted password from Result. You can play with it even at design-time. Since the UnixCrypt component uses one-way encryption algorithm, there is no way to decrypt the keys. For authentication you can only compare two encrypted passwords.