Hacking

Well today I spent a bit of time looking up how /etc/shadow created their shadow passwords. I found a good source for the method at http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/SHA-crypt.txt , and if you take some time to review it you will notice the steps are a bit involved Lucky for us Python has a Crypt module that works nicely. First off I started by creating a dummy user with the password of test on one of my Linux computers:

After a bit of thinking I believe I have a better way to create all possible ASCII pass phrases, rather than create a recursive function that calls itself as I did in the previous post. This method takes a slightly different approach, but I believe it to return the same results. First off let’s create a list of all lower case ASCII character numbers: >>> chars = range(97, 123) >>> chars [97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122] >>> map(chr, chars) ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z'] Next we can set our max word width and current word width variables: