Re: Need to generate passwords

["Leif's other PC" <leif@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: PaulMmn <PaulMmn@ix.netcom.com>


>I beg to differ re: a "Dictionary" attack against a random word +
>(random) number--
>
>How will a dictionary attack determine my password, FREESIA527?
>Or FREEWAY527 or FREEZE527?  Or SNOW27 or EGRET9 for that matter??
>


The attacker first builds a word list from a dictionary. This list contains
say 50,000 words, then he expands the list by adding three digits to
each word. That expands the list to 50,000,000 words. He then takes
the first 7 characters of each of these words and calculates the encrypted
password for these words, stores them on the disk (the remaining three
characters are dealt with easily and separately) with the encrypted
value as a key. He then looks in the encrypted password file to see
what encrypted password a given user has and uses that value as
a key to locate the word, and the password is found.