shipley@remarque.berkeley.edu (Pete Shipley) (04/15/91)
In article <PJNESSER.91Mar27142853@mbunix.mitre.org> pjnesser@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 ... :-) >-- When wrote a system that stores a list on encrypted words on 3 exa-byte tapes. The data is stored as a sorted listed structers contained the encrypted text and a unsigned short. The u_short contains an index number to the dictionary used to generate the tapes, the saved 4-bytes per entery and improves security since the contence of these tapes can't not be used to crack a password directly. The run time to scan these tape was about 2.5 hours (the bottle neck is in the access time to the tape).