---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2002 09:15:21 -0500 From: Steve Bellovin <smb@research.att.com> To: cryptography@wasabisystems.com Subject: password-cracking by journalists... A couple of months ago, a Wall Street Journal reporter bought two abandoned al Qaeda computers from a looter in Kabul. Some of the files on those machines were encrypted. But they're dealing with that problem: The unsigned report, protected by a complex password, was created on Aug. 19, according to the Kabul computer's internal record. The Wall Street Journal commissioned an array of high-speed computers programmed to crack passwords. They took five days to access the file. Does anyone have any technical details on this? (I assume that it's a standard password-guessing approach, but it it would be nice to know for certain. If nothing else, are Arabic passwords easier or harder to guess than, say, English ones?) --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@wasabisystems.com