Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi folks,

What will be the easy way to decrypt encrypted passwords on MySQL table. Googling brought me many suggestions on crypt/decrypt running scripts. Please advise. TIA

Remark:
I think the encrypt function of MySQL uses the Unix crypt command to encrypt


B.R.
satimis

The word encrypted makes you think that there is a de-crypt command of some kind.

The passwords are really “hashed”.

A cryptographic hash function is a deterministic procedure that takes an arbitrary block of data and returns a fixed-size bit string, the (cryptographic) hash value, such that an accidental or intentional change to the data will change the hash value. The data to be encoded is often called the "message", and the hash value is sometimes called the message digest or simply digest.
The ideal cryptographic hash function has four main properties:
• it is easy to compute the hash value for any given message,
• it is infeasible to find a message that has a given hash,
• it is infeasible to modify a message without changing its hash,
• it is infeasible to find two different messages with the same hash.

So if we want to get a password back from a hash we have to do it by guessing and testing.