Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!proxftl!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Worm/Passwords
Message-ID: <220@twwells.uucp>
Date: 27 Nov 88 11:40:22 GMT
References: <22401@cornell.UUCP> <4627@rayssd.ray.com> <251@ispi.UUCP> <205@twwells.uucp> <8981@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Reply-To: bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells)
Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale
Lines: 41

In article <8981@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
: In article <205@twwells.uucp>, bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells) writes:
: > Save yourself some effort. Go hunt up a `travesty' program. (I think
: > that was the name.) I recall seeing them in some computer magazines in
: > the last year or so, and didn't I see one get posted?  You ought to
: > be able to modify one to create pronouncable passwords with only a
: > little effort.
:
:       [A travesty of my message]

:-)

: Which pretty much sums it up.  (The above was created via
: "travesty 2", which is the minimum practical scope.  Larger
: values produce a very high percentage of actual English words.)

Here are the words from your travesty that might do as passwords:

	creater crecable crecall huncall lassword lithat magazin
	modidnt onesty ourself passwort programe prograve pronough
	reater recable seeine sompute somputed traves traveste
	wassword wasswort withated wittle yought youncabl youncall
	yoursee

(I got a few chuckles making up meanings for some of these, though at
least one is actually a valid English word.

Say, what's a `huncall'? Loot! Loot! Loot! :-)

These were obtained by removing punctuation and words shorter than six
letters, truncating words longer than 8 letters, and deleting words
that `spell' accepted.  As you can see, many of these would make
easily pronounceable passwords.

Using a better database might create more or better passwords.  And
each user could have his own database; this makes knowledge of the
travesty algorithm useless for guessing someone's password.

---
Bill
{uunet|novavax}!proxftl!twwells!bill