On Tue, Dec 19, 2000 at 11:00:38PM +0100, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> My knowledges in crypto is very limited, but I noticed that the
> passwd field is always the same length whatever passwd you enter :)
> Hum, maybe I was too oriented toward remplacing the cipher with gzip :)

That is because those are MD5 hashes, not encrypted data.
When you enter a password the getty MD5 hashes your string and compares
it with the current actual hash, if they match, it gives you access..
Those cannot be decyphered, but only forced using a large dictionary and
a permutation generator