Xerox Alto zero-day: cracking disk password protection on a 45 year old system

Re:Xerox Alto zero-day: cracking disk password protection on... by jjwiseman on Thursday January 04, 2018 @03:55PM (#16073996)

Passwords like "HGFIHD" and "AAJMAKAY" look like initialisms. It might be fun to try to decode them. (xxxAKAY on a Xerox PARC disk from the 70s/80s... could it be?)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Xerox Alto zero-day: cracking disk password protection on... by kens on Thursday January 04, 2018 @04:12PM (#16074131)

I should mention that I didn't want to leak someone's actual password (even if it's 40 years old), so I perturbed the passwords slightly. The real password doesn't exactly end in AKAY, so it's not Alan Kay. (Apologies for throwing cold water on your clever idea.)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Xerox Alto zero-day: cracking disk password protection on... by pieguy on Friday January 05, 2018 @02:38AM (#16077188)

There's a decent chance the passwords you found aren't the actual passwords either, considering how easy it is to generate collisions for the hash function.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Xerox Alto zero-day: cracking disk password protection on... by Cyberdog on Thursday January 04, 2018 @04:15PM (#16074164)

Read a bit further on. The algorithm has a flaw where some of the first bits from the password are unused. "AAJMAKAY" was a working password that the author's brute force script found, but the "real" password probably had different characters at the beginning.

[ Parent | on HN ]