On 8/21/07, Smoot Carl-Mitchell <<a href="mailto:smoot@tic.com">smoot@tic.com</a>> wrote:<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> On Tue, 2007-08-21 at 14:25 +1000, Michael James wrote: > /etc# cat shadow > root:*:13661:0:99999:7::: > daemon:*:13621:0:99999:7::: > bin:*:13621:0:99999:7::: > <snip lots more system entries> It is not a good idea to reveal your password hashes (I have removed them from this email). The MD5 hashing algorithm used to generate the hashes in GNU/Linux systems is fairly strong, but can be broken with a brute force type attack which is much simpler if you know the password hashes. I'd suggest changing your password, since everyone on the list now knows your password hashes. This is the principal reason /etc/shadow is protected from normal users. The '*" in the second field could be any character, since a single '*' is not a legitimate password hash. In practice the '*' is used conventionally to indicate a locked account. For a quick introduction to the various Unix/Linux password hashing schemes see: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypt_(Unix)">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypt_(Unix)</a> -- Smoot Carl-Mitchell System/Network Architect email: <a href="mailto:smoot@tic.com">smoot@tic.com</a> cell: +1 602 421 9005 home: +1 480 922 7313 </blockquote></div>Are those really Md5 hashes? I thought (correct me if i'm wrong) that an md5 hash was exactly 32 bytes of hexadecimal.