leah blogs « 32, 040, 0x20, 0b100000 October 2019 09oct2019 · Ken Thompson's Unix password Somewhere around 2014 I found an /etc/passwd file in some dumps of the BSD 3 source tree, containing passwords of all the old timers such as Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian W. Kernighan, Steve Bourne and Bill Joy. Since the DES-based crypt(3) algorithm used for these hashes is well known to be weak (and limited to at most 8 characters), I thought it would be an easy target to just crack these passwords for fun. Well known tools for this are john and hashcat . Quickly, I had cracked a fair deal of these passwords, many of which were very weak. (Curiously, bwk used /.,/., , which is easy to type on a QWERTY keyboard.) However, ken s password eluded my cracking endeavor. Even an exhaustive search over all lower-case letters and digits took several days (back in 2014) and yielded ...