Earlier quoted context omitted.
30 years ago I cracked everyone’s Unix password on an old Sun computer. It didn’t take long because everyone had a password that was in the dictionary. Needless to say, people were not happy with the messenger.
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…
Ken Thompson's Unix Password
421–430 of 665 posts
Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password
#422This brings back memories of a common exploit w/tftp, such that you could download an unshodowed /etc/passwd file from a remote machine, decrypt it, log into that remote system, collect new hosts from /etc/hosts, then rinse and repeat. Hash rate were pretty slow back then, but the fact that people used passwds straight out of dictionaries helped, so I'm told...
Back in college I ran ToneLoc overnight and would try ftp on the successful hits. One server didn't have root set, so I telnet'ed, when prompted for the password, and I was in.
I ran 'who', saw a user logged in. Decided to wall them a message of "You should really set your root password." and logged out.
A couple of days later, I got an email on the trash email account I would use for ftp logins - dude was super nice but freaked out and wanted to know how I found his server. I didn't reply.
Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password
#423I 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…
Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a common refrain, mailing lists do need a lot of instructions at the bottom to make sense — email wasn't made for groups. It's like 'group' SMS, your phone might provide you with a single chat window with all your friends, but what it really is doing is just sending a separate SMS to every one of the recipients. So you need the 'the manual' attached to every message to make sure people get it right. Looks dow…
> email wasn't made for groups I've always wondered why people didn't use newsgroups instead of mailing lists.
Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
> email wasn't made for groups I've always wondered why people didn't use newsgroups instead of mailing lists.
"Any sufficiently complicated group communication system contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Usenet."
Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used ambiguous language, "strong hash". I should've used "strong KDF" rather than "strong hash", a hash can be strong for other purposes, but makes a poor KDF for hashing passwords, such as single-round SHA-256. In the ideal world, if your password is a random word with 128-bit entropy, no strong KDF is needed, there's no need for PBKDF2, bcrypt, or Argon2, a single round of SHA-256 is sufficient. > In the example…
Can ROT-13 really be called a hash though? It's literally an ancient chipher.
* Where "plain" excludes a technical or mathematical definition that might include e.g. troll_hash(x) { return 9; }
Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
30 years ago I cracked everyone’s Unix password on an old Sun computer. It didn’t take long because everyone had a password that was in the dictionary. Needless to say, people were not happy with the messenger.
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'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 a math co-processor", and even write software for it, but I have no idea what goes on inside and I wouldn't know where to even start trying to build one from scratch.
Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
For all its flaws, innocent until proven guilty is still the fairest justice system. Beyond a reasonable doubt is a high standard of proof. Because we use this standard, it is natural for people to look for reasonable doubts when talking about accusations. That is how western society works. And for very good reasons.
> innocent until proven guilty is still the fairest justice system Justice system administered by a state where the repercussions include imprisonment and death - absolutely. But HR is not a judicial system and should not be viewed as one. I think I take your point to be just a descriptive observation of "our social discussion reflects a habit based on our exposure to judicial systems" and not a normative statement.…
Re: Ken Thompson's Unix Password
#429I 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 also had the bright idea to try this on library computers and email kiosks around campus used by thousands of students. Rather than booting into Ophcrack I'd just log in with the admin account and run pwdump from a USB stick to collect password hashes. I figured out how to enumerate Windows machines over the network using NetBIOS and ran the pwdump utility remotely using psexec, so that I could hit every computer in the library at once, or every computer in a computer lab, etc.
I ended up cracking credentials for most students and faculty on the entire campus. I was really young at the time and thought this was some real cool James Bond shit. 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. It was purely a hack for the thrill of breaking down barriers and outsmarting the security. But MONTHS later after I had long since grown tired of tinkering with this stuff, a couple of uniformed police officers pulled me out of Calculus class and took me downtown. They tossed my dorm room and confiscated my computer and my phone and every piece of digital storage I owned. The school threw the book at me, I guess because they were so embarrassed by their incompetence on display from being beaten by a 16 year old.
(Posting on my alt account for obvious reasons.)