PASSWORD GUESSING

[Jim Frost]

In article <24888 at prls.UUCP> gordon at prls.UUCP (Gordon Vickers) writes:
|       The advice I see most often, and use myself is to simply pick
|   two unrelated words that are seperated by a symbol, with the entire
|   password being seven or eight charectors in length.  Care to figure
|   what the odds are of a hacker breaking it ? 

Sure.  Very good if the hacker has (exclusive) access to a good
parallel machine, or access to several PC's and a good crypt()
implementation.

One of the problems of the UNIX password scheme is that it believes
that you don't have 50+ mips of processing power and a reasonably
efficient crypt().  (In fact I know someone who did a fairly complete
scan of 6 letter passwords using heavy parallelism; this is likely to
become more common as machines get faster.)

Since there are a variety of simple ways to get around this problem
which have been discussed in full on this and other newsgroups, I
won't go into it.  Just remember that machine speed is rising quick
enough for brute-force to be effective.

jim frost
software tool & die
madd at std.com