[18249] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: online MD5 crack database
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Victor Duchovni)
Mon Aug 22 11:03:53 2005
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Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 10:48:52 -0400
From: Victor Duchovni <Victor.Duchovni@MorganStanley.com>
To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
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In-Reply-To: <20050822140829.4CF383BFF2F@berkshire.machshav.com>
On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 10:08:29AM -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> >In 1985 I was told by an MIT professor with DoD
> >connections and a clearance that certainly no
> >later than 1979 the folks at Fort Meade had every
> >possible BSD password indexed by its /etc/passwd
> >representation. Reversing a password meant to
> >simply look up the /etc/password text on-disk to
> >see what tape it was on and to then read that
> >tape.
> >
>
> I'm sorry, I flat-out don't believe that. For one thing, why would
> that have been necessary in 1979? Unix just wasn't that important.
> For another, let's do some arithmetic.
>
More plausible perhaps if they had used a space/time tradeoff, to make
the space manageable, then the question is whether CPUs were fast enough
or character set sufficiently restricted to make the pre-computation
feasible.
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