Sun, 5 Jan 2020
Debian support for libxcrypt
glibc 2.29-7 and libxcrypt 1:4.4.10-10 today entered Debian testing: crypt(3) and the other related library functions in libcrypt from now on will be provided by libxcrypt instead of glibc.
After 18 months of packaging work, Debian finally supports modern password hashing methods like yescrypt: the details about them are documented in crypt(5).
For the time being there is still no support for libxcrypt in our release of PAM, but hopefully the Debian maintainer will update the package soon and this will allow using yescrypt by default.
If you want to test now the new algorithms then you can generate a password using my mkpasswd program and copy it to /etc/shadow:
# echo "marco:$(echo 12345 | mkpasswd --stdin)" | chpasswd --encrypted