Tagged as: Security

I was discussing passwords with someone recently and thought of a neat little hands-on exercise that shows not only how password hashing works, but shows you a real-world example of cracking a weakly hashed password just using Google.

The hands-on exercise should be easily approachable for beginners. I'll also go over a general history of passwords on the Internet -- I've been working as a web developer long enough to watch the whole transition from MD5 to bcrypt play out.

Requirements

Any Unix-like environment with the md5sum command. Most Linux distros have it by default as part of the coreutils package. The Windows Subsystem for Linux might work.

Mac OS might have these built-in too. Not sure.

Or just find a program that can generate MD5 hashes for you, preferably as a downloadable program you run on your computer, or one that runs from a web page but in JavaScript and without the server being involved.

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