[Mailman-Users] Re: several messages

[John W Baxter]

At 19:57 -0800 1/8/2002, Satya wrote:
>Going the other way -- decrypting the encrypted string -- is very,
>very, difficult.

It's not all that hard, hence shadow passwords, and also different methods
of encrypting.  In the mid-90s, a high end desktop machine was said to be
able to produce a working password, given the encrypted one, in half a day
or so, by brute force (and without raising red flags by testing with the
system in question).  (The 8-character password limit inherent in using
crypt() puts a nice constraint on the brute force method's maximum time.)

  --John

-- 
John Baxter   jwblist at olympus.net      Port Ludlow, WA, USA