Program for decrypt linux shadow file

Question

Is there any program or script available for decrypt Linux shadow file ?

Answer 1

Passwords on a linux system are not encrypted, they are hashed which is a huge difference.

It is not possible to reverse a hash function by definition. For further information see the Hash Wikipedia entry.

Which hash function is used, depends on your system configuration. MD5 and blowfish are common examples for used hash functions.

So the "real" password of a user is never stored on the system.

If you login, the string you enter as the password will be hashed and checked against your /etc/shadow file. If it matches, you obviously entered the correct password.

Anyway there are still some attack vectors against the password hashes. You could keep a dictinoary of popular passwords and try them automaticly. There are a lot of dictionaries availiable on the net. Another aproach would be to just try out all possible combinations of characters which will consume a huge amount of time. This is known as bruteforce attack.

Rainbowtables are another nice attac vector against hashes. The idea behind this concept, is to simply pre calculate all possible hashes and then just lookup a hash in the tables to find the corresponding password. There are several distributed computing projects to create such tables, the size differs on the characters used and is mostly several TB.

To minimize the risk of such lookup tables its a common practice and the default behaviour in Unix/Linux to add a so called "salt" to the password hash. You hash your password, add a random salt value to the hash and hash this new string again. You need to save the new hash and the salt to be able to check if a entered value is the correct password. The huge advantage of this method is, that you would have to create new lookup tables for each unique salt.

A popular tool to execute dictionary or brute force attacks against user passwords of different operating systems is John The Ripper (or JTR). See the project homepage for more details:

John the Ripper is a fast password cracker, currently available for many flavors of Unix, Windows, DOS, BeOS, and OpenVMS. Its primary purpose is to detect weak Unix passwords.

Answer 2

It is practically impossible to decrypt those paswords since they are one-way encrypted.

Answer 3

You can only decrypt the shadow file by brute force: It includes hashes of the passwords, so your only chance is to guess passwords, calculate the hash and look if the hashes are identical. See wikipedia for details about the hash generation.

Answer 4

As others have said, you can't really decrypt the shadow file.

The only thing you can try is to brute-force guess the password using a tool like John the Ripper. This may or may not succeed, and will almost certainly take a long time.

Answer 5

Passwords are encrypted using an algorithm that will take a password and create a hash that is unique to that password. This hash is stored in the /etc/shadow file. It is not possible to recover the password from the hash. The only methods of recovering a password is to either brute force the entire keyspace or to use some sort of dictionary attack. Early hash functions used the DES standard. The increase in computing power has made it possible to brute force the DES keyspace in a reasonable time. Modern hash functions used to encrypt passwords include MD5, SHA etc. More information on the crypt(3) library can be found here.