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- Embed this notice@Moon @vriska One of the first systems that I worked on had 3-letter passwords. I was an undergrad back then, mind. So, after some snooping around I found that it kept them in a 16-bit word. That immediately made me think about Radix-50 encoding, and after some quick cryptoanalysis in Fortran IV, I found that the encryption was a rotation left by 5 bits. The master password was "WOW". Using this information, I went around universities in the city, penetrating student terminal rooms, and getting privileged access. For one of them, I forged a student ID by using a pencil and a piece of paper that I attached to my own ID with small chunks of bread in leu of removable adhesive. When the developers heard about this, they updated the system to keep 8-character passwords in a separate file, accessible with a special syscall, and modified all utilities of course.