Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!texbell!sequoia!rpp386!jfh
From: jfh@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US (John F. Haugh II)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: PASSWORD GUESSING
Message-ID: <16924@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US>
Date: 21 Aug 89 04:03:42 GMT
References: <1919@aucs.UUCP> <737@rwing.UUCP> <1043@accuvax.nwu.edu> <3532@internal.Apple.COM> <3126@rti.UUCP> <24888@prls.UUCP> <36830@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Reply-To: jfh@rpp386.cactus.org (John F. Haugh II)
Organization: TrishTrash Readers, Inc.
Lines: 25

In article <36830@bu-cs.BU.EDU> madd@buit15.bu.edu (Jim Frost) writes:
>In article <24888@prls.UUCP> gordon@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.

I'd say its a virtual certainty any good programmer could break that
system in a very small amount of time.

A few questions crop up - how many three or four letter words are
there, versus possible three or four letter combinations of letters.
Next, how many special symbols are there.

The answer should be a small enough number for my PC to get it over
one or two nights of crunching.
-- 
John F. Haugh II                        +-Quote of the month club: ------------
VoiceNet: (512) 832-8832   Data: -8835  |  Speaking of Netnews Administration:
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