On Wed, Apr 06, 2011 at 11:52:04PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: > Is the salt just bits that are either pre- or suffixed to your > password before being run through the hashing function?
The salt is generally appended to the password. For the specific case of passwd(1), I'm not entirely sure, without looking at the source. > The first 3 characters of every hash in my /etc/shadow are the same. > That's what, 24 bits? Thats.... interesting. Each salt is created at random. Combined with the password string, it shuold produce a very unique hash. Because your hashes all start with the same 3 characters, then you've been very lucky in the output, due to the immense size of the keyspace. > But if you're machine is rooted then (besides having lots of other > problems) the attacker has your system-wide salt. (But the rainbow > table would still be unimaginably huge...) The salt is not system-wide, but local to the account. Each account will have a unique salt, by default. -- . o . o . o . . o o . . . o . . . o . o o o . o . o o . . o o o o . o . . o o o o . o o o
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