Forum cracks the vintage passwords of Ken Thompson and other Unix pioneers

'As one of the original versions of Unix, BSD is an ancient operating
system. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it used what are, by
today’s standards, strange, even ridiculous security. For one, the
hashing function protecting passwords, though state of the art 40
years ago, is now trivial to crack. Stranger still, the password
hashes of some BSD creators were included in publicly available source
code. And then, there are the passwords people chose.

Last week, technologist Leah Neukirchen reported finding a source tree
for BSD version 3, circa 1980, and successfully cracking passwords of
many of computing’s early pioneers. In most of the cases the success
was the result of the users choosing easy-to-guess passwords.

BSD co-inventor Dennis Ritchie, for instance, used “dmac” (his middle
name was MacAlistair); Stephen R. Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell
command line interpreter, chose “bourne”; Eric Schmidt, an early
developer of Unix software and now the executive chairman of Google
parent company Alphabet, relied on “wendy!!!” (the name of his wife);
and Stuart Feldman, author of Unix automation tool make and the first
Fortran compiler, used “axolotl” (the name of a Mexican salamander).

Weakest of all was the password for Unix contributor Brian W.
Kernighan: “/.,/.,”—representing a three-character string repeated
twice using adjacent keys on a QWERTY keyboard. (None of the passwords
included the quotation marks.)

But there were at least five plaintext passwords that remained out of
reach. They included those belonging to Turkish computer scientist
Özalp Babaoğlu, Unix software developer Howard Katseff, and crucial
Unix contributors Tom London and Bob Fabry. But the uncracked hash
that seemed to occupy Neukirchen the longest was the password used by
Ken Thompson, another Unix co-inventor.

“I never managed to crack ken's password with the hash ZghOT0eRm4U9s,
and I think I enumerated the whole 8 letter lowercase + special
symbols key space,” Neukirchen reported in the above-linked thread,
posted to the Unix Heritage Society mailing list. “Any help is
welcome.'

-- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/forum-cracks-the-vintage-passwords-of-ken-thompson-and-other-unix-pioneers/

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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