From crypt To GPU Breakers … thank Morris!
Okay. We all know that passwords are on the way out, as they just don’t protect us full anymore. Hopefully, soon, most systems will use MFA (Multifactor Authentication). For the history of the password, we need to go back to the 1960s, and to the days when IBM ruled the computing world, and where mainframe computers ruled the roost:
The use of passwords first started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and allowed multiple people to share the use of a mainframe computer. But, soon, we had the first “hacker”, and where Allan Scheer found a way to print out the password list and “hack” the system. It took until 1970 for Robert Morris to translate a password into an encrypted form, and which limited the opportunities for someone to discover the password. At the time, it was not possible to reverse back the encrypted form back into the password.
Morris worked on the Unix operating system at Bell Labs and coded the crypt password encryption method (and invented by Roger Needham). With this, a hashed version of the password is stored in the /etc/passwd file on the system. You may know of the name “Morris” from the infamous Morris worm. This was actually created by…
