Password guessing

• Solutions are annoyingly evasive

• One solution: system-supplied passwords

• Problem: then people write them down

• Ritchie tells a nice story about system-supplied passwords:

  • System-supplies randomly-generated password

  • But random number generator has only 15-bit seed

  • Result: only 2¹⁵ = 32768 possible different passwords

  • Trivial to pregenerate a list and try them all

  • Ooops

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Copyright © 2005 M. J. Dominus