[aerovistae]

Wtf? The second problem, listed after the Caesar cipher, is to reverse the hashing algorithm used for passwords on Linux.

What? How is that even remotely fair to ask as a challenge alongside something like the caesar cipher? One of these is a children's task while the other is a professional cryptographer's task. Am I missing something here? I'm sure it must not be terribly hard to do, but it's still so disproportionate to the previous task that I'm shocked.

[monocasa]

You're not reversing anything first off, it looks like you're just call crypt(3) with every potential password since they put a five character cap on it. 600M or so combinations, so pretty trivial, but feels fun. I'm actually all for this assignment, it makes you feel all hacker typer.

Secondly, it's DES. DES hasn't been viable for almost two decades now.