The Death Throes of crypt()

dex writes "Tom Perrine and Devin Kowatch of the San Diego Supercomputer Center have issued "Teracrack: Password cracking using TeraFLOP and PetaByte Resources" (PDF, HTML version via Google). Using SDSC's prodigious computing facilities, they precomputed 207 billion crypt() hashes in 80 minutes."

Comments

Re:A testament to crypt()

[minektur]

Change that to

while (!fork());

and you'll have a much more interesting program.

With your version, if the program is not run as root, root has a good chance of 'kill -STOP' ing them all and then 'kill -9' ing them. Since the pid list is fairly static it is somewhat easy to get a ps listing and then run kill on the pids.

With my version, not only do you get constantly changing pids but you also get the bennefit of having more forks going on continuosuly, more memory exercised, etc. Much more fun.