online MD5 crack database

[Victor Duchovni]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 10:08:29AM -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:

> >In 1985 I was told by an MIT professor with DoD
> >connections and a clearance that certainly no
> >later than 1979 the folks at Fort Meade had every
> >possible BSD password indexed by its /etc/passwd
> >representation.  Reversing a password meant to
> >simply look up the /etc/password text on-disk to
> >see what tape it was on and to then read that
> >tape.
> >
> 
> I'm sorry, I flat-out don't believe that.  For one thing, why would 
> that have been necessary in 1979?  Unix just wasn't that important.
> For another, let's do some arithmetic.
> 

More plausible perhaps if they had used a space/time tradeoff, to make
the space manageable, then the question is whether CPUs were fast enough
or character set sufficiently restricted to make the pre-computation
feasible.

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