Hacking

[Phil Ronzone]

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.

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



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Philip K. Ronzone                  S e c u r e   U N I X           pkr at sgi.com
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