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Ken Thompson's Unix Password

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Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password

#561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem like it should be obviously true to me. If the hash algorithm was rot13 it would be pretty easy to determine the password from the hash regardless of the strength of the password

Rot13 is not a hashing algorithm. A hashing algorithm is a one-way function where many entities in the input domain map to the same entity in the output codomain. This means if you have the hash you can't determine the input with out making a guess. Rot13 is a function with a one to one mapping between the domain and codomain. If you have the output you can apply a function to get the input.

But you don't care about finding the original password. You only care about finding a string that after applying the hash function, gives the same out.

That's why you can have a hash function like h(x) = 0, whose value gives you no information about x, and still not being able to use it.

Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password

#562

I remember cracking the password from a Windows system in high school. There was a centralized login mechanism using Novell but everything was cached locally. So you could boot a Linux CD and copy the password file to a memory stick, and crack at home. I think I used lophtcrack? The head admin account for the entire school district (basically root) had the password “north”. It took like a fraction of a second to crac…

This exact thing happened to me, except I accessed a network drive linking to some juicy information. The school expelled me and the state went after me. I ended up getting a misdemeanor expunged!

Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password

#563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inherited a system at current (for a few more weeks) employer (recently written so no excuse) that had used a weak hash for the password, I pointed out to my boss how bad it was and that it shouldn't have happened, he didn't pay a great deal of attention. So I threw the OpenMP variant of John the Ripper at it (I'd just built a 8C/16T Ryzen machine and was curious) it broke ~80% of the passwords in under an hour and a…

> I know enough about security to know that I really don't know about security. I'm not sure anyone ever gets past this point. There's way too much for any person to know and not enough hours in a day or days in a year or years in a lifetime to master everything. Even when it comes to computers in general at some level it just becomes magic to me. I might be able to point to a chip and say "that's the sound chip" or…

That’s my feeling as well, I try to follow best practices at the level I work at and hope everyone on the levels below me did the same.

Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password

#564

I remember cracking the password from a Windows system in high school. There was a centralized login mechanism using Novell but everything was cached locally. So you could boot a Linux CD and copy the password file to a memory stick, and crack at home. I think I used lophtcrack? The head admin account for the entire school district (basically root) had the password “north”. It took like a fraction of a second to crac…

I got kicked out of school when I was fifteen for doing this. My class was the first year to have a mandatory laptop program. Each laptop was running Windows XP on the schools AD domain. I booted up OPH-crack at home, and didn't get a result. So then I torrented a larger rainbow table and ran it again for three days. Boom, there I had it.

My motivation for this was wanting to install my own software on the laptop that my (underprivileged) family was forced to pay for (much more than what it was worth). This was not an optional item, it was a requirement of the state-run school. The student user account was not given local administrator rights on the computer.

After using the administrator account for six months to install my own software (this is when I first taught myself how to program), the school did a random "computer" check, where they confiscated everyone's computer - unannounced, at random, and simultaneously. My computer was asleep, signed onto the administrator account.

During the inspection, the school's IT administrators and an external contractor not only went through all of the files on the local computer, but they also my Gmail account which had credentials saved in Firefox.

When my father was called into the office to discuss what they found, the school had the state police there to discuss charges. After listening to them rant on for about thirty minutes, my father turned to the female police officer and calmly said "I would like to press charges against [ ...... ] school, and Mr [ ...... ] personally for accessing my child's email account in an unauthorized manner". The head master agreed to not proceed with charges but I was no longer welcome at the school.

Unrelated, but five years later, Mr [ ...... ] was charged with possession of child pornography and jailed for fifteen years.

Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was expelled from university for pulling off the exact same exploit with the "workstation only" feature in Novell. In my case, they put a computer in every dorm room, and every single one of them had a domain-wide administrator account cached in its SAM file. It was inevitable that a student would find it. It's been almost 15 years now but I believe the password was rac3c4r or something trivial like that. I ran Oph…

>I never once used it for evil: never read anyone's email, never viewed anyone's private files, never poked around the academic file shares for test solutions, never tried to steal credit card numbers or social security numbers from the finance office's file share. I don't understand this justification. The system owners can't know that to be true and have to proceed as if the systems are compromised. Would you still…

The purpose of the whole system is education. He used it exactly for that.

Just make it more secure so the next people can have a bigger challenge.

Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password

#566

Since this password list appears to come from one of the original systems on which UNIX and C were developed, it would be fun to see the names and original passwords of all the luminaries. I merged together the author's work, the original /etc/passwd, and the comments from the mailing list: root:OVCPatZ8RFmFY:Ernie Co-vax --> cowperso daemon:*:The devil himself --> (login not allowed) bill:.2xvLVqGHJm8M:Bill Joy -->…

The superset of all of the original CSRG-shipped cracking-eligible descrypt hashes is actually about 1400 hashes, drawn from a slightly smaller number of overlapping accounts among releases. Many of them appear to have been temp/test/throwaway with generic usernames and short, simple passwords.

Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password

#567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem like it should be obviously true to me. If the hash algorithm was rot13 it would be pretty easy to determine the password from the hash regardless of the strength of the password

Rot13 is not a hashing algorithm. A hashing algorithm is a one-way function where many entities in the input domain map to the same entity in the output codomain. This means if you have the hash you can't determine the input with out making a guess. Rot13 is a function with a one to one mapping between the domain and codomain. If you have the output you can apply a function to get the input.

Not sure why the downvotes. Comradesmith's assessment of rot13 is absolutely correct. Clearly rot13 is more like PGP, in that you can recover the plain text from cypher text.

Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password

#568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decent email client will display these as a foldable hierarchy, sort of like HN or Reddit's posting interface, just with the body of the posts hidden. With that and full text search it's not so hard. It's the web interfaces that are a bit bulky.

A lot of them will use an algorithm similar to this one https://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html

Great read! Just noting that the website redirects you to an obscene (but funny) image if this site is the Referer. Disable Referer before clicking or copy the link into the toolbar manually.

Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password

#569

I remember cracking the password from a Windows system in high school. There was a centralized login mechanism using Novell but everything was cached locally. So you could boot a Linux CD and copy the password file to a memory stick, and crack at home. I think I used lophtcrack? The head admin account for the entire school district (basically root) had the password “north”. It took like a fraction of a second to crac…

I got kicked out of school when I was fifteen for doing this. My class was the first year to have a mandatory laptop program. Each laptop was running Windows XP on the schools AD domain. I booted up OPH-crack at home, and didn't get a result. So then I torrented a larger rainbow table and ran it again for three days. Boom, there I had it. My motivation for this was wanting to install my own software on the laptop tha…

i wouldnt call it unrelated. He clearly had past behavior violating the privacy of his students with the cover of politics and police. Its how predetors like this operate, finding an authority position and exploiting it. And he clearly got away with it that time.

Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password

#570
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a good defense against a charge of burglary would be not having stolen anything. In an imaginary perfect criminal justice system, charges/penalties are based on damage done. Less damage done is a lesser crime.

> In an imaginary perfect criminal justice system, charges/penalties are based on damage done. Hell no. Otherwise you could just set up one gigantic crime by comitting a bunch of small "no damage done" crimes along the way-say, stealing a string of credentials one at a time, but not actually using them until you have all of them together and then you commit your major heist/crime.

Well, the imaginary perfect criminal justice system would probably arrest you right as you had completely committed to causing the damage, instead of afterwards. But it should still be justifying the arrest based on the act that caused damage, not the harmless acts that set you up to be ready to do it.
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