Penetration Testing: RE: Craking Serv-u passwords stored in .ini file.

[avarni () tech cj com]

On Fri, 3 Sep 2004, M. D. wrote:

> Hi Michael,
>
> It would have been much stronger, for example, the following:
>
> 1) hash the password, with or without prepending the salt, doesn't matter. I'm not using it in this example:
>     password: test
>     MD5 hash: 098F6BCD4621D373CADE4E832627B4F6
>
> 2) append the salt to the hash:
>     new "password": ab098F6BCD4621D373CADE4E832627B4F6
>
> 3) hash the resulting string:
>     new MD5 hash: BDF3BAAC3C947956A57CFA97310B5DE0
>
> 4) append the salt to the last hash if you like, but I don't see any particular reason to do so

Huh?  Salting does make things harder for password crackers.  And yes,
you need to display the salt in plaintext.  If you skip step #4 as
you propose here, then how does the authentication program know which
salt was used?

Prepending or appending the cleartext salt is a requirement. Otherwise
you'd have to check all possible salts each time someone tries to
authenticate.

> OK, that's it for now.
> Enjoy.
>
> Nekromancer

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ethical Hacking at the InfoSec Institute. All of our class sizes are
guaranteed to be 12 students or less to facilitate one-on-one interaction
with one of our expert instructors. Check out our Advanced Hacking course,
learn to write exploits and attack security infrastructure. Attend a course
taught by an expert instructor with years of in-the-field pen testing
experience in our state of the art hacking lab. Master the skills of an
Ethical Hacker to better assess the security of your organization.

http://www.infosecinstitute.com/courses/ethical_hacking_training.html
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------