[kismac] Re: password hash

I'm not sure what the plaintext / hex relationship is in WEP, but it was a WEP secured router that I cracked with Newsham's and KisMAC spit out 5 hex values. I went to connect with airport and put in those values and it let me in. I was just wondering if there was anyway to get from those hex digits to what the "real" password is.

I think probably the hex values can be generated from the "password", but not the other way around. I know that a password can be quite long, and will still be reduced to a 40-bit key (i.e. the 5 16-bit hex words)... so information must be discarded, and that information can't be re-created from the resulting key. It is possible that if you had the algorithm used to generate the hex key from the password, then you could "brute force" crack the original password by running a dictionary file or a string-generator through that algorithm until you got a "match" - exactly the same way as one cracks an /etc/passwd file - but as everyone has already pointed out, the only reason to do that is curiosity: the hex key is what matters; everything else is just a way to make that key more user-friendly.

Cheers,
Robin
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 Robin L. Darroch - PO Box 2715, South Hedland WA 6722 - +61 421 503 966
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