leah blogs: Ken Thompson's Unix password

Somewhere around 2014 I found an /etc/passwd file in some dumps of the BSD 3 source tree, containing passwords of all the old timers such as Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian W. Kernighan, Steve Bourne and Bill Joy. Since the DES-based crypt(3) algorithm used for these hashes is well known to be weak (and limited to at most 8 characters), I thought it would be an easy target to just crack these

[tkancf]

ケン・トンプソンのパスワード解析が5年かけて破られた話 パスワードにチェスの駒の動き入れるとかシャレてるな

[yyamano]

This is a chess move in descriptive notation, and the beginning of many common openings. It fits very well to Ken Thompson’s background in computer chess.