I need to implement account management for my application, and I would rather not use chpasswd subprocess, or otherwise let the plaintext password out my my application's memory space.
I want to use putspent with a password hash I generate with crypt, but I can't find any standard function to randomize a salt for crypt. An online search only found weird hashing function implementations I'd rather not copy into my code. Is there a standard function that would generate a salt for me?
Otherwise, would it be wise to just re-use the current salt stored in my shadow file? I couldn't think of why it WOULD be a security hazard (it will not weaken my shadow file against a rainbow table attack), it just feels wrong because in systems security a rule of thumb is to always randomize everything... (Users are added with system utilities)