Hacking and "Amateurism"

[Joachim Richter]

In article <JASON.91Apr10225530 at lancelot.cs.odu.edu> jason at cs.odu.edu (Jason "dedos" Austin) writes:
>	
>	It's not too hard to show that it is possible to decode a
>password.  Every time the same salt and the same password is run
>through the crypt function, the same code comes out. 
>(It would have to
>or the thing wouldn't work at all) At the worst case, an exhaustive
>table from coded to decoded passwords woul; give right answers.  Even
>if the relation is not 1-1 and each code has more than one possible
>decoding, any of the valid decodings would let you log in.  Of course,
>this would be quite a large table to calculate considering all the
>permutations.
>--
>Jason C. Austin
>jason at cs.odu.edu


Right. Of course you can do that.
You can also, for a given object file, find the source code,
that, when compiled, gives that object code that way. No problem.
Maybe it will take a while - some millions of years or so.
But, since the number of source codes, that give the same object code
is infinite, your chance is not so bad :-)