Break root passwd

[Thammi Venkateswarlu]

I want break root passwd with out reboot system.Any one can help on this?

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

you can if you use some kind of 3e party backup product. Backup the passwd on system B, restore the passwd file from system A to system B (redirected). Login with root passwd system A, change passwd and restore the passwd back from tape.

Did you ever use .rhosts or imported a ssh key?

Otherwise you need to reboot in single user mode.

Regards,
Robert-Jan

[Bill Hassell]

If "break root passwd" means to decode it so you can read the password, that is not possible. The mechanism used by Unix systems is a one-way conversion, so there is no decoder possible. Restoring the passwd file from another system is not poossible unless you have have a root login. But if you have a root login, then you can fix the password by editing the passwd file. But this is not the method you would use if your system is Trusted or the system uses a shadow password file.

There are several ways to fix the password if you have sudo, or root has a .rhosts connection from another system, or you have ssh with a public login from another system. All of these solutions require a prior installation and/or setup.

[Olivier Masse]

Passwords can't be decoded as Bill said, but they can be "cracked". We're talking about a dictionnary attack here, so passwords that contain numbers or special characters will likely take a very, very long time. We're talking possibly months, even years, on consumer or business-level hardware. Furthermore, if your system is trusted or has shadow passwords, you need root access to gain access to the password entries.

In the past I've used a tool named "crack", which is still available from the porting centre. I recall that some security people also used crack in the mid 90s to preventively guess weak user passwords before hackers could. But that was before shadow passwords were common, and before strict rules to enforce strong passwords were available.

Good luck.

[Suraj K Sankari]

Hi,

As all gurus said that passwd hacked/decoded is not possible but there are so many crack 3rd party tools are there you can try those tools for crack your root passwd.
More over if you have root equivalent user then also you can change your root passwd
Or if itâ s a cluster system then login into node B as a root and try remsh into node A if you are able to login into node A then you can change your passwd..

Beat of :luck

Suraj

[prasadb]

hi Thammi Venkateswarlu,

keep assigning the proper points to these experts. plz check this link.


http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=140137&admit=109447627+1229927327516+28353475