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Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 10:40:57 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: john-users@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Q about "MaxLen" of incremental mode

On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 01:55:14PM +0800, yl_changjiu wrote:
> Thank you very much for explaining the concepts.i am a beginner on data encryption/decryption and most importantly my mother tongue is not English. I'am a Chinese. i identified my nationality just for sincerity. And i hope this won't bring racial discrimination:)

Let me use this opportunity to ask that "thank you" messages with no
other content useful to list subscribers be sent via private e-mail
rather than posted to the list.  Also, any quoted context should be kept
to a reasonable minimum.

In another message (that I had to reject because of garbled quoting)
yl_changjiu wrote:

> But the fact is that i already done "the default crack" before,
> because i don't know how to configure john, i saw characters like "+,-,!,#..."
> were also included(i know that is not necessary for my hashes).After about 20
> days running(cpu P4 2.66G), only less than 12% are cracked.

That's quite normal.  You didn't expect all of the hashes to be cracked,
did you?  That would make password cracking almost pointless for systems
administrators.  You've identified that 12% of the passwords are weak.
You can now force users to change those passwords or lock those
accounts, and enforce a reasonable password policy at the same time -
assuming that you're in a position to do so.

> i think maybe MaxLen is too small, and want to enlarge it.

As I and Phantom have explained, no, it is just fine for your hashes.
Besides, increasing it would not be trivial.  Luckily, you don't need to.

> What should i do now?

It depends on your goals.  Maybe nothing.  Maybe get those passwords
changed and a password policy introduced.

-- 
Alexander Peslyak <solar at openwall.com>
GPG key ID: 5B341F15  fp: B3FB 63F4 D7A3 BCCC 6F6E  FC55 A2FC 027C 5B34 1F15
http://www.openwall.com - bringing security into open computing environments

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