wzdftpd supports several authentication methods, and all of them are common to all backends. Some methods involves storing encrypted data on the server (crypt, md5, sha), some rely on another authentication layer (pam), and some use strongest authentication methods (certificates, and in the future kerberos and/or radius and/or SASL).
This section explains which methods wzdftpd can use. The method is specified when changin a password, see site chpass command and "passwords" chapter for details.
The default method is to store password in crypt() format, which is a variation of the Data Encryption Standard algorithm (DES) with variations.
To use the crypt format, the password is stored in backend encrypted. The first two chars constitute the salt (it is use to perturb the algorithm).
Passwords stored in crypt format are limited to 8 characters.