17 Feb
2007
17 Feb
'07
11:39 p.m.
Can someone more familiar than I with the math behind one-way hashes explain how a hashed string is compared with a string in plaintext? I had a typo in the text I fed to passwd, and, when I went back in to fix the typo, I got an error message that read: "BAD PASSWORD: is too similar to the old one"
Of course, that was easy enough to override as root, but it raises an interesting question. Anyone game to explain the math behind how it was able to tell?
Thanks, Sean