Friday, July 25, 2003

Windows password flaw exploited; OS X more secure. Writing for CNet, Robert Lemos recounts the efforts of Swiss cryptography researchers to speed the cracking of passwords on Windows-based PCs. At it turns out, applying the same methodology to cracking Mac OS X passwords will eventually yield results, but at a huge penalty of time or computer memory. The system devised by the researchers involves the use of large lookup tables to match encoded passwords. What the researchers discovered is that some Windows operating systems have inherent weaknesses in the way they encode passwords that can make this brute-force methodology much faster. [MacCentral] comment []12:46:42 AM

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