Re: password cracking: one char at a time.

[Kurt Buff <kurt.buff () gmail com>]

michael young wrote:
> Hi all,
>    I was wondering if is at all possible to discover a password one char
> at a time.
> Normally, you either get the password right or wrong (all or nothing).
> Does anyone know if this can be done? Does it depend on the encryption
> algorithm
> used to encrypt the password? Is that a difference for 1 and/or 2 way
> passwords?
>
> thank you,
> Michael

This is the kind of attack that any reasonable password protection
scheme is designed to foil.

In particular, I remember that the design goal of one encryption
algorithm was to be such that if a single charcter of the input changed,
fifty percent of the output changed, or something to that effect.

Kurt