Let's now look into the generation of an alum hash and Elham hash is strictly speaking not a hash since
it uses a DSL rhythm and not a cryptographic hash function.
Why was Microsoft so stubbornly using weak cryptographic algorithms in the past.
The answer is politics the export of strong cryptography used to be restricted in the US windows into
administrators might remember a special patch that allowed them to make use of 56 keys instead of 40
big keys.
The patch was only released once the embargo was lifted.
Microsoft was unable to export strong cryptographic protocols as the American government considered
this a threat.
As you might imagine European software producers strongly supported the ban.
Let's return to the L-M hash assume the user's password is the string Seattle one.
The protocol converts the string into uppercase in earlier versions of windows such as XP user passwords
aren't case sensitive
upper case and lower case letters can be used interchangeably since the string will be converted anyway.
The system doesn't recognize the case of letters used in the password.
The second drawback is that the protocol restricted allowable characters to alphanumeric only
after a string was converted to capital letters.
The password was divided into two parts.
The first seven characters were the first part of the password.
The other seven are the second part.
The password has two ideal halves in order to make the two parts equal.
Passwords were padded with spaces to 14 characters.
If you use L-M they are still padded in this way.
This has interesting implications and will come back to this later.
One of the consequences to this solution was that an eight character password is more vulnerable than
a password that has 7 characters the eighth character meant that a part of the password was made up
from one character and nulls.
This was a fixed string.
So even from the D.S. cipher you can deduce what was there.
The character could also hint to what was contained in the first part.
If the character was the last digit of a birthdate you could assume that the earlier characters were
the preceding digits.
We already have the 2 7 character parts.
Now each part is separately encrypted with the D.S. algorithm using a fixed key.
A literal output of the encryptions is then joined using an ordinary concatenation.
The result is a LAN Manager password
as we've seen a LAN Manager password is not 14 characters long.
It's split into two 7 character passwords since both parts of the password can be cracked separately.
The number of operations needed to crack it is lowered again.
It's enough to perform about 10 to 12 power operations to check all else manage your passwords for modern
machines tend to the twelfth.
Power is not a large number.
A password can be cracked in a matter of seconds
and the land manager has a protocol that employs solutions that are both simpler and less vulnerable.
Above all it ops for a hash function instead of the D.S. because of the restrictions and the embargo
we mentioned.
The hash function is not very secure its message Digest version for
is not a serious problem however as nobody will try to generate a password that will have a hash identical
to yours.
This attack would not make any sense.
What's the difference between enty and LAN Manager passwords.
First the anti passwords are case sensitive.
They also allow you to use a password that is longer than 14 characters and implication that it's worth
noting is that if you work on a system that uses LAN Manager for example on Windows XP with the default
configuration is kept you should provide the 15 character password or longer
a LAN Manager hash can be generated from this password.
And so Windows will not generate the hash.
You'll be a lot more secure than anybody else for any TLM the maximum password length is 127 characters.
What does this mean.
The simple fact that passwords aren't broken in half and letters aren't converted to uppercase means
that an alphanumeric only password like the passwords used in LAN Manager requires tend to the 25th
power operations to brute force this provides a lot more security.
If you use a fourteen character password with special characters a brute force attack will take ten
to the sixty seven power operations.
And if you insisted on using up all the password space provided 127 characters cracking the password
using a brute force attack would required tend to the 611 operations
a. And then tell them passwords are deterministic.
It's similar with Linux in Unix systems.
Determinism means that the same hash must always be generated from the same password.
There's no seed in it.
That would create pseudo randomness
when manager was used up to the release of Windows Vista.
The protocols that replace it give us a lot more security.
If you still use Windows XP at least select a different protocol than LAN Manager.