Install bcrypt with Homebrew, dnf, MacPorts

Project links

• Homepage
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• bcrypt

Project history

Johnny Shelley published bcrypt 1.1 in 2002 under a BSD-style license. The project page ties the tool directly to Bruce Schneier's 1993 Blowfish algorithm and Paul Kocher's public Blowfish implementation, with local changes shipped in the bcrypt source archive.

The 1.1 release notes emphasize portability work: bcrypt had been tested across FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Cygwin, Win32, Solaris, Mac OS X 10.1 Server, HP-UX, Alpha, MIPS, PPC, SPARC, and other systems. The same notes warn users upgrading from 1.0 on some unsupported architectures to decrypt and re-encrypt files because early portability bugs could affect compatibility.

Adoption history

bcrypt's adoption pattern is typical of early-2000s security utilities: a small upstream tarball, a SourceForge homepage, and packaging by Unix-like distributions for users who wanted a simple local file encryptor. The Homebrew, Fedora, and MacPorts package names preserve that utility even though modern searches for 'bcrypt' usually find password hashing libraries instead.

How it is used

The documented interface is deliberately small: run bcrypt on one or more files, producing .bfe encrypted files; run it again on .bfe input to decrypt. Options control stdout output, compression, removal of input files, and the number of overwrite passes before deletion.

Why package nerds care

For package historians, bcrypt is interesting because it is a name collision frozen in package indexes: this package is a Blowfish file-encryption CLI, while 'bcrypt' is now better known as a password hashing algorithm. It also captures a period when secure deletion, endian portability, source tarballs, GPG signatures, and cross-architecture binary compatibility were front-and-center concerns for small security packages.

Timeline

• 1993: Bruce Schneier publishes the Blowfish algorithm, which bcrypt later uses.
• 2002: bcrypt 1.1 is released by Johnny Shelley with bug fixes, broader operating-system support, better speed, and lower memory use.
• 2000s-2020s: Unix package managers continue carrying bcrypt as a niche file-encryption utility.

Related projects

• Blowfish is the cipher family named by the bcrypt documentation as the cryptographic basis for the tool.
• zlib is the compression dependency documented for the source build.
• Modern bcrypt password-hashing libraries are related mainly by name and Blowfish lineage; they are not the same package or interface.

Sources

• https://bcrypt.sourceforge.net/
• https://bcrypt.sourceforge.net/bcrypt-1.1.tar.gz
• source_facts.package-manager