Linux Security HOWTO : Password Security and Encryption : "Crack" and "John the Ripper"
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6.9. "Crack" and "John the Ripper"

If for some reason your passwd program is not enforcing hard-to-guess passwords, you might want to run a password-cracking program and make sure your users' passwords are secure.

Password cracking programs work on a simple idea: they try every word in the dictionary, and then variations on those words, encrypting each one and checking it against your encrypted password. If they get a match they know what your password is.

There are a number of programs out there...the two most notable of which are "Crack" and "John the Ripper" (http://www.openwall.com/john/) . They will take up a lot of your CPU time, but you should be able to tell if an attacker could get in using them by running them first yourself and notifying users with weak passwords. Note that an attacker would have to use some other hole first in order to read your /etc/passwd file, but such holes are more common than you might think.

Because security is only as strong as the most insecure host, it is worth mentioning that if you have any Windows machines on your network, you should check out L0phtCrack, a Crack implementation for Windows. It's available from http://www.l0pht.com


Linux Security HOWTO : Password Security and Encryption : "Crack" and "John the Ripper"
Previous: Shadow Passwords.
Next: CFS - Cryptographic File System and TCFS - Transparent Cryptographic File System