The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

A few years back, Ken Thompson’s 1980 Unix password got cracked.

It took that long because his password p/q2-q4! had enough entropy by using uncommon characters so the crypt(3) based hash ZghOT0eRm4U9s was hard to crack.

The password was an opening chess move noted in the variety of the descriptive notation. A shorter notation would have been P-Q4, which would require months to crack in that era.

In modern chess notation, it would be 1. d4, moving the Queen’s Pawn from d2 to d4.

References (many interesting messages in the TUHS thread below):

• [WayBack] unix-history-repo/passwd at BSD-3-Snapshot-Development · dspinellis/unix-history-repo · GitHub
• [WayBack] leah blogs: Ken Thompson’s Unix password
• [WayBack] Ken Thompson’s Unix password #VintageComputing #History #Unix « Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!
• [WayBack] Ken Thompson – Chessprogramming wiki
• [WayBack] Fefes Blog: Wed Oct 9 2019
• [WayBack] Descriptive notation – Wikipedia
• [WayBack] Chess Opening Theory/1. d4 – Wikibooks, open books for an open world
• [WayBack] The Unix Heritage Society
• [WayBack] The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
• [WayBack] [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files
  

  From: Finn O'Leary @ 2019-10-03 18:51 UTC (permalink / raw)
    To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
  
  Hi, I remember that someone had recovered some ancient /etc/passwd files
  and had decrypted(?) them, and I remember reading that either ken or 
  dmr's
  password was something interesting like './,..,/' (it was entirely
  punctuation characters, was around three different characters in total, 
  and
  was pretty damn short). I've tried to find this since, as a friend was
  interested in it, and I cannot for the life of me find it!
  
  Do any of you remember or have a link? :)
  Thanks!
  
  --
  "Too enough is always not much!"

• [WayBack] Re: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files – Nigel Williams
  

  From: Nigel Williams <nw@retrocomputingtasmania.com>
  Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
  Subject: Re: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files
  Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 16:49:48 +1100
  Message-ID: <CACCFpdx_6oeyNkgH_5jgfxbxWbZ6VtOXQNKOsonHPF2=747ZOw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
  In-Reply-To: <8088e5bd-3530-d3e1-8066-db6ea9389dea@kilonet.net>
  
  ken is done:
  
  ZghOT0eRm4U9s:p/q2-q4!
  
  took 4+ days on an AMD Radeon Vega64 running hashcat at about 930MH/s
  during that time (those familiar know the hash-rate fluctuates and
  slows down towards the end).

• [WayBack] Re: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files – Andy Kosela
  

  From: Andy Kosela <akosela@andykosela.com>
  To: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>
  Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
  Subject: Re: [TUHS] Recovered /etc/passwd files
  Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 10:16:02 +0200
  Message-ID: <CALMnNGgVFHiBz5n0YZq8FiMt=iVN0t4dKKzCrKHk25fdq+0w7A@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
  In-Reply-To: <CANCZdfoaUm-FTDhBk05zQ_CTdEQ2y1uw9irQpxqzSVgOCUMjbQ@mail.gmail.com>
  
  On 10/9/19, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
  > On Tue, Oct 8, 2019, 11:52 PM Nigel Williams
  > <nw@retrocomputingtasmania.com>
  > wrote:
  >
  >> On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 4:49 PM Nigel Williams
  >> <nw@retrocomputingtasmania.com> wrote:
  >> > ZghOT0eRm4U9s:p/q2-q4!
  >>
  >> BTW, is that a chess move?
  >>
  >
  > Most common opening.
  >
  
  Descriptive chess notation is not as popular today as it was back in
  the 70s, but it actually makes perfect sense as Ken is a long time
  chess enthusiast.
  
  --Andy

Via:

• [WayBack] Leah die Schreckliche 👻 di Twitter: “Enjoy: Ken Thompson’s Unix password”
•  

  [WayBack] adafruit industries on Twitter: “Ken Thompson’s Unix password #VintageComputing #History #Unix”

–jeroen

https://twitter.com/leahneukirchen/status/1181923633628942336

https://twitter.com/adafruit/status/1181959012381872128