RE: Craking Serv-u passwords stored in .ini file.

[avarni () tech cj com]

On Fri, 3 Sep 2004, M. D. wrote:

> Hi Michael,
>
> It would have been much stronger, for example, the following:
>
> 1) hash the password, with or without prepending the salt, doesn't matter. I'm not using it in this example:
>     password: test
>     MD5 hash: 098F6BCD4621D373CADE4E832627B4F6
>
> 2) append the salt to the hash:
>     new "password": ab098F6BCD4621D373CADE4E832627B4F6
>
> 3) hash the resulting string:
>     new MD5 hash: BDF3BAAC3C947956A57CFA97310B5DE0
>
> 4) append the salt to the last hash if you like, but I don't see any particular reason to do so


Huh?  Salting does make things harder for password crackers.  And yes,
you need to display the salt in plaintext.  If you skip step #4 as
you propose here, then how does the authentication program know which
salt was used?

Prepending or appending the cleartext salt is a requirement. Otherwise
you'd have to check all possible salts each time someone tries to
authenticate.

> OK, that's it for now.
> Enjoy.
>
> Nekromancer


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