short answer: no.
try cheating: at the same time you write the login and encrypted password to your htpassword file, write the login and unencrypted password to a hidden file accesable only to you for future reference.
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Browse All TopicsDoes anybody have a script in perl to decrypt the password?
Need it to autosend lost passwords to the user.
Thanks!
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by: icdPosted on 1998-01-30 at 01:50:23ID: 1831886
The theory goes that the password encryption is a one-way process. By this I mean that it is not computationally feasible to decrypt it.
The way that this works is that when a user enters a password, it is encrypted and compared with the encrypted version in the file.
The user is only allowed in if the two encrypted versions match.
There is no way to recover a lost password, the only option is to issue a new temporary password to the user, the encrypted version of the new password replaces the old. The user should then change his/her own password so that only they know it.
Only a brute force method can be used to find out the contents of a password file, for example by encrypting a dictionary file and comparing the encrypted version against each password. This will only work if the user has used a dictionary word as a password, hence the recommendation to use both characters and numbers in a password. Such programs however run for days and days and cannot be guaranteed to decrypt all carefully chosen passwords. Besides, this is not what you want to do is it? ;-)