UNIX Co-Founder Ken Thompson’s BSD Password Has Finally Been Cracked

In 2014, developer Leah Neukirchen spotted an interesting
“/etc/passwd^[1]” file in a publicly
available source tree of historian BSD version 3, which includes
hashed passwords belonging to more than two dozens Unix luminaries
who worked on UNIX development, including Dennis Ritchie, Stephen
R. Bourne, Ken Thompson, Eric Schmidt, Stuart Feldman, and Brian W.
Kernighan.

Since all passwords in that list are protected using
now-depreciated DES-based crypt(3) algorithm and limited to at most
8 characters, Neukirchen decided to brute-force them for fun and
successfully cracked passwords (listed below) for almost everyone
using password cracking tools like John the Ripper and
hashcat.

The ones that she wasn’t able to crack belonged to Ken Thompson and
five other contributors who helped build the Unix system, including
Bill Joy, who later co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1986 and
designed the Java programming language.

All Passwords Have Finally Been Cracked, Except Just One!

Earlier this month, Neukirchen posted all her
findings^[3] on the Unix Heritage
Society mailing list and requested other members to help to crack
the remaining passwords.

Thompson’s password has been revealed as “p/q2-q4!a” — a
notation in chess to describe the move “pawn from Queen’s 2 to
Queen’s 4.”

Just a day after Willians revealed Thompson’s password, another
mailing list member, Arthur Krewat, successfully cracked and
provided the passwords for four
more^[5] remaining uncracked
hashes.

Here below we have listed plaintext passwords of all Unix
luminaries, including their names, usernames and original hashed
versions of their passwords:

Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix

• Hashed → ZghOT0eRm4U9s
• Plaintext → p/q2-q4!

Dennis Ritchie, co-inventor of BSD and creator of the C
programming language

• Hashed → gfVwhuAMF0Trw
• Plaintext → dmac

Brian W. Kernighan, Canadian computer scientist and Unix
contributor

• Hashed → ymVglQZjbWYDE:
• Plaintext → /.,/.,

Stephen R. Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell command line
interpreter

• Hashed → c8UdIntIZCUIA
• Plaintext → bourne

Eric Schmidt, an early developer of Unix software and Former
Google CEO:

• Hashed → FH83PFo4z55cU
• Plaintext → wendy!!!

Stuart Feldman, author of Unix automation tool make and the
first Fortran compiler

• Hashed → IIVxQSvq1V9R2
• Plaintext → axolotl

Here’s a list of cracked passwords belonging to other computer
science pioneers:

Until now, all members in the list that Neukirchen found have had
their passwords cracked except Bill Joy, whose username is bill and
hashed password is “.2xvLVqGHJm8M”