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Video transcript: Hacking the Linux passwd and shadow files

This is a transcript for a video linked here: Hacking the Linux passwd and shadow files.

Video transcript - Hacking the Linux passwd and shadow files




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hello this video is a guide to how

linux stores usernames and passwords



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this will include instructions on how you can

perform password recovery on a linux system



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using raspberry pi as an example and we're

going to show how you can reset the password



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without knowing it in the first place this

video is also an introduction for a video



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i plan to make in the future which will show

how hackers try and crack the system passwords



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in my earlier video i explained about the

importance of passwords in this video i'm



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going to look at these in a bit more depth

on how they are stored on the linux system



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and then the future video will show some of the

vulnerabilities of how they are stored i'm going



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to start with a little history just because this

will make the explanation both little simpler



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and it'll explain the reason that the password

field is configured the way it is linux is based



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on the unix operating system back in the 1980s and

earlier as my children would say the olden days



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the password information was

stored in the password file



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the file is often known as the

etc password or passwd file



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and it's available to anybody on the local

system to be able to read this has some



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security implications which i'll explain about

later the file is plain text so anybody can view



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it although you need to be root to be able to

edit it and just go through the fields here the



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top line shows the names of the fields and now

i'm going to show a working example here so



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the first field is the username typically

this represents the real name of the user



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or it may refer to a system account

such as root which is the admin account



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the next field is the password if we put the plain

text password here then it would be readable for



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anybody which is obviously bad instead this is

a hash value of the password and this particular



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example is an md5 hash of the word password i'll

explain hashing and its vulnerabilities later in



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the video on newer systems the password is moved

to the shadow file and instead you just get an x



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in this position in the password file this has

an extra level of security and i'll explain all



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about why this came about you may also see an

asterisk or an exclamation mark which indicate



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that the account will not accept logins although

typically that will be in the shadow file as well



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but if the password field is blank then a user

can log in without needing supply password



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which is usually a bad idea but useful

for password recovery as i'll show later



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next are the user id and group id the uid is a

unique number for this particular user and the gid



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is id of the default group for this user on modern

systems they'll normally be a group name which



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is the same as a username and these are created

automatically when you use the add user command



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and the uid and gid will be the same for user

accounts the uid and gid typically starts at 1000



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the lower numbers are reserved for the special

accounts now here that i'm showing that line



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wrap into the next line this would actually all

be on a single line the next field is shown is



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known as the gcos field i'll refer to above as

the user info field and this is where you include



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information about the user such as their name

possibly their phone number or other information



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next is home directory normally each

user has their own home directory which



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is in the slash home directory and

is named the same as their username



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and the final field is the shell this is the

command line user interface that you get when



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logging in through a text terminal or using a

remote terminal such as ssh for most users this



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will be the best shell which is slash bin bash for

system accounts that do not allow logins then this



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is normally set to slash usr slash s bin no login

which will not allow interactive shell sessions



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as i mentioned previously this is the password

field and you can't put the plain text password



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in that field as it obviously everyone then would

be able to read it and know what your password was



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so we need a way that the computer can know

if you've entered the correct password but so



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that anyone else that looks at it can't tell what

your password is this is where a hashing algorithm



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comes in i'm going to show this using md5 this was

used for passwords in the past but the algorithms



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used today are usually a lot more secure md5

is still quite widely used for other purposes



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the md5 stands for the message digest algorithm an

md5 is one implementation it's not necessarily the



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fifth version as the name might suggest because

some of the version numbers were never actually



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used i'm going to walk through how the md5 hashing

algorithm works we start with the password here



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and here i've used the word password obviously

you'd use a more secure password than this



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this is processed by the md5 hashing algorithm

and this results in a 32 character long string



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note that this is actually a 16 bit

hexadecimal number that represented as text



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the important thing is the direction

of the arrows in the diagram



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so now that whilst you can go from the

password and get the output it is not



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possible to reverse this and get back

to the original password if you have the



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hashed output if that was possible it would

break the whole concept of the password hash



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and it would render it unsafe i won't go into the

details of how the hashing algorithm works this



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diagram gives an approximation the important thing

is not to be able to go in the reverse direction



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now this is one of the key differences between

encryption which can be reversed versus hashing



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which can't obviously for encryption you do need

to know the key and the algorithm to be able to



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reverse it but even if you know how the algorithm

works for a hashing algorithm you can't reverse it



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so only the output of the hash is ever saved on

the computer and after storing it in the password



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file the computer cannot find out what your

original password was as it cannot be reversed the



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way the computer is able to validate the password

is that when you enter your password it performs



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the same hash algorithm against it and checks

to see if it matches the saved password hash



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now md5 is now considered to be broken it's not

that it's possible to go in the reverse direction



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but it may be possible to create a collision

instead which is another string that gives the



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same md5 hashtag value so whilst you might not

be able to get back to the original password



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what you might be able to do is think of another

password that would give you the same value



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it's still quite complicated

but it is theoretically possible



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even before the algorithm was broken there were

other ways of defeating the clashing algorithm



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method of creating passwords and some of these are

still possible with some of the other algorithms



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i've discussed some of these in my earlier

video where i discussed ways of guessing the



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password using dictionary attacks and brute force

attacks and these both rely on trying different



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combinations of possible passwords and just

passing them through the same hashing algorithm



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an additional risk with a hashing algorithm

such as md5 is that it's possible to create



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rainbow tables these are often used by online

md5 decryption tools and you're able to have a



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go one of those if you want they're a form of

brute force attack but instead of needing to



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re run the algorithm for every permutation

they run once and compute it into a large table



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and then that table can be

efficiently searched afterwards



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a way of defeating this is by adding a salt to

the password and this salt is a known string and



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it's normally added to the start of the password

before the hashing and it prevents the tables



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being used so as long as different salts are used

for different systems it effectively makes it



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unfeasible to be able to create sufficient rainbow

tables to be able to break it using this method



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there's a few of the hashing algorithms that are

used for linux passwords and when you look at the



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password string that is generated they start

with a few characters and these are telling



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you the algorithm that's used so that the system

knows what algorithm to apply to your password



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and this choice is normally made by your

distribution but if you have a choice of



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hashing algorithm then i would recommend the

two bottom ones are the sha 512 or yes crypt



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and those are the ones that are commonly used on

most linux systems so if you look at this it's



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showing you that md5 the first few letters of

the password entry would say dollar one dollar



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and for yes crypt it's dollar y dollar and

you'll be able to see those if you look in your



00:11:00.080 --> 00:11:05.760

password file or technically your shadow file

will come on to that in a minute so although



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the new hashing algorithms are much safer they

have still got risk of dictionary or brute force



00:11:12.560 --> 00:11:18.800

attacks especially if the user chooses a poor

password and this is why the password is no longer



00:11:18.800 --> 00:11:28.640

stored in the etc password file instead it's

moved into a different file called /etc/shadow



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which is a bit of a compromise because the

ideal solution would be to make the /etc/passwd



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file so that only the admin root user could read

it and then you can just have it all in one file



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however that would have broken other programs

which were relying on being able to access the



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safer information that's contained in that

file so the solution they came up with was



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to remove the password from etc passwd file and

instead store that into the file etc shadow and



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if you look at the passwd file the password field

has been replaced by an x lowercase x character



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which tells the system to look at the shadow file

instead of the password being in the password file



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this shows the format of the shadow file and the

username is the same as the password file and



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then the password which is stored in the second

field and again this is the hashed password field



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they also added other fields which

store details about when the password



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was last changed the minimum and maximum

days that the password is valid for



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the number of days to warn

before forcing a password change



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the number of days after it's inactive before it

gets disabled and finally when the account expires



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as promised i'm now going to show how you

can use what we've just learned about the



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password and shadow files if you find

yourself locked out of a linux system



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this is based on using a raspberry pi it'll also

work with other linux systems but in that case



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you will either need to boot into a system remote

or what's known as recovery mode or perhaps use



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a live boot disk to be able to access the system

and then onto the drives alternatively you could



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always remove the drives from the computer

but that's of a bit more hands-on physically



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with a computer compared to the raspberry pi where

it's just a case of pulling out your micro sd card



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here i am i've got a raspberry pi system

and i've set a very long password and



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i don't know what the password is so effectively

i'm logged in i can try guessing a password



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i know that the user is pixel server but if i try

the password hit enter i'll click log in incorrect



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password please try again and without knowing

that password obviously i can't get on the system



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however the one thing about linux systems in

fact most computer systems if you can physically



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access the drive and the data is not encrypted

then there's ways of resetting the password



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so that's what we're going to do i'm going to shut

this computer down and then remove the sd card



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bring that into another computer and show

you how i can basically remove the passwords



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so i've taken the sd card out of the raspberry pi

i'm going to pop this onto my linux computer here



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so you need to put this into a computer that's

able to read ext4 file systems which is what is



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used by linux so as you can see the elements is

is my external drive so we can ignore that we've



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got two drives appeared one's boot and the other

is called rootfs boot is the fat32 file system



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that holds the boot information but the root fs

is the entire root file system on the raspberry



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pi so this is the one we're interested

in and we're going to click on that and



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we're going to go into etc and the password

file and the shadow files are both in here



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there we are we've got the password and the

shadow files you'll see that we're actually



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unable to edit this at the moment and we don't

have permissions to view that that's what this red



00:16:06.320 --> 00:16:13.600

circle is so we're gonna have to do this as root i

can do is launch terminal and then we'll change to



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that so it's it's mounted into media then under

my own username and then it's called root fs



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and it's then in the etc and it's the shadow so

you have to use sudo to edit this as root and we



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can edit i'll use the via editor you could use

nano or you could use any other editor you want



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and now i'm going to go through

this to find the password of the



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user that i wanted to get on so you can

see says pixel server is the username



00:16:59.600 --> 00:17:05.760

and as i said the dollar y

dollar indicates that this is a



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yes crypt a hash value and basically we can just

remove that entire thing up to the next colon



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and now this has got no password and that

means you can just log in without any password



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we'll save that i'm going to just run sync that's

just going to make sure that it's written to the



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sd card and it's not just kept in a buffer

anywhere and then i can switch back to the



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window we can just eject that busy because

i'm still in it so just eject that now



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it said it can now be safe to remove so i'll

pop that out pop that back into the raspberry pi



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and we'll see if that's worked so i've taken that

sd card after i've modified the shadow file and



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put that back into the raspberry pi and booted

up now without a password in find a lot of the



00:18:17.920 --> 00:18:22.480

default network services won't allow you to log

in anyway they'll only let you log in if there



00:18:22.480 --> 00:18:31.360

is actually a password set so in this case i'm

actually physically on the raspberry pi here



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i've got a console connected directly to the

hdmi output so i can log in directly here



00:18:44.080 --> 00:18:51.440

the username's pixel server just leave password

blank and click login and as you can see it's



00:18:51.440 --> 00:18:58.000

taking me straight in there's no password needed

and that's thanks to editing that password file



00:18:58.880 --> 00:19:01.440

very important that you change

that password straight away



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so we can just use the passwd command



00:19:07.360 --> 00:19:10.160

now i'm going to use a really simple password here



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just going to use the word password

obviously you wouldn't use that



00:19:18.560 --> 00:19:23.840

but this will now allow me to

have a look at that shadow file



00:19:28.880 --> 00:19:30.080

that we edited earlier



00:19:32.160 --> 00:19:35.520

and you'll see that this has

put that password in so this



00:19:35.520 --> 00:19:40.320

is the yes crypt version of the word password



00:19:43.680 --> 00:19:50.240

and that's how you can recover a server

where you've logged and lost the password



00:19:50.240 --> 00:19:54.800

the important thing really is that it's the

physical security that prevents you doing this



00:19:55.360 --> 00:20:02.720

if you can physically access a device then

you're going to be able to get to the data



00:20:02.720 --> 00:20:06.720

unless it's all encrypted and that's

the only way you can really protect



00:20:07.280 --> 00:20:12.640

the data if somebody can physically get

hold of the disks that it's stored on



00:20:14.560 --> 00:20:18.000

so obviously i'm going to change this

password now to a nice secure one



00:20:19.760 --> 00:20:24.240

hopefully this video has given you an insight

into how the linux password and shadow files work



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remember the md5 example used was only for example

purposes there are much better hash algorithms



00:20:32.400 --> 00:20:37.280

available today if you learned something new

from this video please give it a thumbs up



00:20:37.920 --> 00:20:42.720

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00:20:42.720 --> 00:20:49.760

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