Re: CISCO MD5 encryption

[krymson () gmail com]

There are two different things here.

1- How strong is salted MD5 against rainbow attacks (pre-computation)?

2- How strong is salted MD5 when the salt and hash are known (for someone with crypto-fu)?

The first one is very strong still. The second one, not so much.

The contributor who mentioned config confidentiality policies has the right of it. Password lenths should also be long 
to make post-computation of such tables more difficult. Yes, you'll need to do that whether you want to "decrypt" the 
password or just find a collision. Likewise, change your passwords regularly.

Still, none of this follows that Cisco + MD5 === insecure kneejerk. It requires more thought than that.


<- snip ->
Do we KNOW what Cisco's password-checking code looks like?

Since you can copy the running configuration text file to a virgin device
and it all works, I'd say that there's an excellent chance that any password
entered will be accepted if the hash matches -- that is, an engineered
collision is as good as recovery of the actual password.

David Gillett

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