Most of the UNX crypt-based password types can all be parsed from similar strings. This password type represents a password in encoded string format. This allows passwd-style files to be read in and used directly.

The type of password is derived from the first few characters of the string.

The PasswordFactory API is used to translate crypt strings to other password and password spec formats. The Password.getAlgorithm() method should be somehow usable to identify the algorithm of the password string. This field would be set by the PasswordFactorySpi implementation when importing a CryptStringPasswordSpec object successfully.

References:

http://pythonhosted.org/passlib/modular_crypt_format.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypt_(C)