>>]One thing it's important to remember is that there are many passwords that
>>]hash to the same value. Even if you and I have the same salt and the same
>>]hash value, it doesn't mean we chose the same password - though it DOES mean
>>
>>has come up a lot before, and there have been answers on both sides, but no
>>proof either way that I have seen.
>
>DES has a theorectical weakness in that for any key there are exactly 7 other keys that will
>crypt to the same string. I.E. if your password is "batman!" there exist seven other keys which
>are not "batman!" that will allow access to your account. Fortunately they are almost certainly
>extremely strange strings like "@gW #s(u", and not likely to match a human generated password.
>
>Another interesting thing about DES is that there are 8 keys that crypt to a string of
>all spaces and there are even keys that when encrypted reproduce themselves in the
>crypted output. Weird.
Talk about encryption - how about those encrypted characters after column 80?
Anyway, on to the real subject: If there are 8 keys to every hashed password,
wouldn't a brute force search actually only require 1/8 of the number
of attempts to randomly hack passwords?
In light of this fact, doesn't this make the brute force method
much more feasible. Oh, and one more thing - I would just like to say that if you can read this you may be able to get a job as a high paying unix programmer and travel to far away lands to meet fabulous people who may be able to realize that not every program has word wrapping.
