Ion Auth encryption method

[eluser]Fred Riley[/eluser]
Sorry to post another Q to this forum, but could someone please tell me what encryption methods Ion Auth uses? I've been trying to sherlock this by trying to replicate the hash for the default admin user password, which is 'password'. In the SQL setup script in the Ion Auth package the hash of this is:

59beecdf7fc966e2f17fd8f65a4a9aeb09d4a3d4

However, I've tried a MD5, a SHA-1, and a MD4 hash generator (though I believe that MD4 is long deprecated), and don't get the above hash for the string 'password'. The length of it looks as if it should be MD5, going by the Wikipedia entry on the algorithm. There's nothing in TFM that I can see.

The reason I'm asking is that I want to be able, during development, to change a user password in the 'users' table directly in phpMyAdmin. I also like to know how things work, and my ignorance on this has been bugging me for a while.

Also, could someone explain what purpose the 'salt' serves? I suspect that it changes the hash value, which could explain why I can't replicate the value above, but I really don't know.

Sorry, I know very little of encryption, even though I do use encryption tools

Fred