Eksblowfish is a variant of the Blowfish cipher, modified to make the key setup very expensive. This doesn't make it significantly cryptographically stronger but is intended to hinder brute-force attacks. Eksblowfish is a parameterised (family-keyed) cipher. It takes a cost parameter that controls how expensive the key scheduling is. It also takes a family key, known as the "salt". Cost and salt parameters together define a cipher family. Within each family, the key determines the encryption function. This distribution also includes an implementation of bcrypt, the Unix crypt() password hashing algorithm based on Eksblowfish.