Re: question regarding samba usage
Pending further investigation, we now allege that Ethan Benson wrote:
>
> the smbpasswd crap comes from MS changing win95b, win98, NT4sp4, W2K
> etc to send a unsalted password hash instead of the password to the
> server, where the hash is compared with the hash stored in the local
> password file, if the two hashes match the authentication suceeds.
> its hardly better then sending clear text passwords over the network
> since you can simply use the hash *as* the password. (to make it
> worse the hash is rather weak anyway, especially since its unsalted
> which makes it quite easy to brute force) in short your not really
> losing any security by disabling MS's so called `encryption'. MS
> didn't make this change for security purposes, they made it to break
> samba.
>
This is not true. The original LANMAN authentication that was used by
IBM and Microsoft in Lan Manager, and kept in Windows 95 by Microsoft
was very weak. Microsoft added NTLMv1 in the original NT4. NTLM is
much more secure than LM, because it creates a 56 bit MD4 hash based on
the entire password and removes the whole 7 character issue in the
original LM.
The default on NT4 was to allow servers to accept LM requests.
There's a registry setting that disables this, but since Windows 95
did not at that time support NTLM, hardly anyone used it. Later on,
Microsoft added NTLMv2 in SP4, and they also included NTLM support for
Windows 98 and Windows 95, so they made the default config to not
accept LANMAN authentication. This had nothing to do with samba, and
a whole lot to do with all of the bad press generated by l0phtcrack.
NTLMv2 improves on NTLMv1 by going from an 56 bit MD4 hash to a 128
bit MD5 hash. NTLMv2 is very difficult to attack with a brute-force
method. This is a good thing, and it bothers me when Linux advocates
criticize Microsoft for increasing the security of their products
(especially when there are so many perfectly valid reasons to
criticize Microsoft).
If you disable encryption, you lose a great deal of security. I'd
like to see evidence of you cracking an NTLMv2 password sent over the
wire that consists of at least 8 characters with a mix of upper case,
lower case, digits, and punctuation. You can get L0phtcrack at
http://www.l0pht.com/l0phtcrack/.
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