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Date: Sat, 08 Apr 2006 13:05:06 -0500
From: Dennis Olvany <dennisolvany@...il.com>
To:  john-users@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: help me understand password cracking

> john know the hashing algorithm and just pass every canidate password
> through the hashing algorithm until it gets one that matches the
> dump from pwdump2

Correct. Here's another interesting thing. Sometimes two different 
inputs will result in the same hash. This is called a collision. It is 
very rare, though.

Collisions are possible because there are a finite number of unique 
hashes and an infinite number of inputs. Though unless I'm mistaken, 
crypt may not be susceptible to collisions because the input is 
truncated to a finite 64 bits.

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