I've been experimenting with BCrypt, and found the following. If it matters, I'm running ruby 1.9.2dev (2010-04-30 trunk 27557) [i686-linux]

require 'bcrypt' # bcrypt-ruby gem, version 2.1.2

@long_string_1 = 'f287ed6548e91475d06688b481ae8612fa060b2d402fdde8f79b7d0181d6a27d8feede46b833ecd9633b10824259ebac13b077efb7c24563fce0000670834215'
@long_string_2 = 'f6ebeea9b99bcae4340670360674482773a12fd5ef5e94c7db0a42800813d2587063b70660294736fded10217d80ce7d3b27c568a1237e2ca1fecbf40be5eab8'

def salted(string)
  @long_string_1 + string + @long_string_2
end

encrypted_password = BCrypt::Password.create(salted('password'), :cost => 10)
puts encrypted_password #=> $2a$10$kNMF/ku6VEAfLFEZKJ.ZC.zcMYUzvOQ6Dzi6ZX1UIVPUh5zr53yEu

password = BCrypt::Password.new(encrypted_password)

puts password.is_password?(salted('password')) #=> true
puts password.is_password?(salted('passward')) #=> true
puts password.is_password?(salted('75747373')) #=> true
puts password.is_password?(salted('passwor')) #=> false

At first I thought that once the passwords got to a certain length, the dissimilarities would just be lost in all the hashing, and only if they were very dissimilar (i.e. a different length) would they be recognized as different. That didn't seem very plausible to me, from what I know of hash functions, but I didn't see a better explanation.

Then, I tried shortening each of the long_strings to see where BCrypt would start being able to tell them apart, and I found that if I shortened each of the long strings to 100 characters or so, the final attempt ('passwor') would start returning true as well. So now I don't know what to think.

What's the explanation for this?