Hacking

[Rodney Peck II]

In article <1991Apr1.173824.20323 at odin.corp.sgi.com> pkr at sgi.com (Phil Ronzone) writes:
>In article <PJNESSER.91Mar27142853 at mbunix.mitre.org> pjnesser at mbunix.mitre.org (Nesser) writes:
>>Someone in this thread pointed out that the way to crack passwords is to
>>maintain a list of encrypted dictionary words and compare against that.  I
>>just want to point out that this is an amazingly expensive way to do it
>>since you have to keep 4096 strings for each word.  Disk space is getting
>>cheaper but ...  It's not that I've figured out a great way to do it myself
>>but ... :-)
>
>
>Well, assuming 100,000 words of 13 characters each, for each of 4096
>possibilities, that gives us 5,324,800,000 bytes. Now, with the
>750MB and 1.2G 5.25" disk drives around, I'd probably have to have
>several of the drives, OR, maybe use a smaller dictionary.

or three exabyte tapes with indexing thrown into the extra 700 meg left over.
cost to you from your local photo/camera shop:  $7.00 per 2 gigabytes.

>100,000 words is a LOT of words .....

not really.

-- 
Rodney