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Special Forums UNIX and Linux Applications John the Ripper application question Post 302378976 by pludi on Wednesday 9th of December 2009 08:52:49 AM
Old 12-09-2009
Short answer: No

Long answer: Let's delve into the cryptographic stuff behind UNIX passwords, GPG, and JtC.
UNIX authentication systems never save the passwords themselves in any form, not even encrypted, but instead use a hash of the password. A hash is similar to a compression function. It takes an array of bytes (say, the letters of a password) and mangles them into a fixed length array. The idea is that a small change in the original text yields a big change in the hash, and that by hashing 2 identical texts you get the same hash. If a user wants to authenticate, the password entered is hashed, and the hash is compared to the one saved.
Since hashing means you loose information, hashes will never be collision free. To prevent 2 users accidentally having the same password hash, salts were introduced. Those are random bits prepended to the password, so that even if two users has the same password, their hashes wouldn't match up.
The biggest difference between hashing and encryption functions is that hashes are very fast.

Encryption, OTOH, takes the input message (your text file) and a key (created from your password), and sends both through an encryption function like AES. Contrary to hashes, the result usually isn't shorter than the original, but it's getting transformed, and it's recoverable while hashes are not. Also, encryption schemes usually are very resilient against attacks. For example, with AES it's still impossible to recover the key in a know-plaintext attack (meaning: you have both the original text and the encrypted text, and it's still impossible to find out the key/password used as to decrypt other messages).

John the Ripper (JtR) uses the speed of hashes to its advantage. A dictionary attack is very fast, even against salted password hashes, and even faster again NTLM passwords. But it can only attack hashes, since they're pretty fixed in their parameters, while for encryption there are a lot of variables, such as key length, algorithm used, and which block mode is being used (CBC/CFB/CTR/...)
 

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MAILER(8)						      System Manager's Manual							 MAILER(8)

NAME
mailer - script to warn users about their weak passwords SYNOPSIS
mailer password-files DESCRIPTION
This manual page documents briefly the mailer command, which is part of the john package. This manual page was written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution because the original program does not have a manual page. john, better known as John the Ripper, is a tool to find weak passwords of users in a server. The mailer tool is useful to inform users which have been found to be using weak passwords by mail. You should edit the message mailer will send to the users, but remember to copy the script to a safe place before editing it, as it's gen- erally a bad idea to modify things living in /usr. SEE ALSO
john(8), unafs(8), unique(8), unshadow(8). The programs are documented fully by John's documentation, which should be available in /usr/share/doc/john or other location, depending on your system. AUTHOR
This manual page was written by Jordi Mallach <jordi@debian.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others). John the Ripper and mailer were written by Solar Designer <solar@openwall.com>. The complete list of contributors can be found in the CRED- ITS file in the documentation directory. john June 03, 2004 MAILER(8)
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