[ale] Plz Help root to decrypt a user PWD

[jmills at TGA.com]

On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Stephan Cerruti wrote:

> Hi
> I know exactly what I am asking and i know this is not very right. But Let me
> explain you why.
> I thought i would be able to avoid talking about that, BUT...
> Agnes was one of my parents, using my computer (before she died) and we have
> several reasons to think that she was using the same password for different
> purposes.

Stephan -

You are assuming two things here:
1) (as you said) 'agnes' used the same password repeatedly, and _also_
2) diverse systems she used perform the encryption in the same way.

If assumption (2) is right, any text string which yields the same key
should work; if that string doesn't work, you need to start again on the
other systems: whether the password is the same or not is immaterial.

  John Mills, Sr. Software Engineer
  TGA Technologies, Inc.
  100 Pinnacle Way, Suite 140
  Norcross, GA 30071-3633
  e-mail: jmills at tga.com
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