Uninvertible passwd encryption (was: Re: Kmem security)

Andy Duplain duplain at rtf.bt.co.uk
Sat Mar 23 20:25:23 AEST 1991


In article <1991Mar20.061813.17416 at agate.berkeley.edu> c60b-1eq at e260-1c.berkeley.edu (Noam Mendelson) writes:
>If one were to crack passwords they would attempt to encrypt strings
>and compare the result to the /etc/passwd entry (since they know the salt).

Absolutely,
	One way of doing this could be using the SunOS l64a() library function,
	which can generate base-64 strings from long ints.  But since l64a()
	can generate a maximum of 6 characters, and since crypt() takes a long
	time to run, it would take several months, and you wouldn't get any
	passwords longer than 6 chars.

	No go!


-- 
=== Andy Duplain ==============================================================
British Telecommunications PLC, Customer Systems, Brighton, United Kingdom.
#define DISCLAIMER My views and options are not necessarily those of my company
Internet: duplain at rtf.bt.co.uk         UUCP: ...!uunet!ukc!axion!bscsq1!duplain



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