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I have installed Oracle VM and on top of it Centos-71. I am logging into the centos by vigrant user and the password is also set during configuring it with chef. Is there a way to decrypt the password of root ?

1 Answers1

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In short: no.

Passwords in linux are not encrypted, but rather salted and hashed using a one-way hash algorithm. It is not possible to derive the cleartext password from the hash. It is possible to brute-force this, but doing so could take anywhere from years to centuries.

EEAA
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    I think that passwords in Linux have been hashed since the very first implementation. – kasperd Jan 02 '16 at 15:24
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    @kasperd I believe you're right. I was just trying to sort through this in my head, and was coming to the same conclusion. I've fixed the answer. – EEAA Jan 02 '16 at 15:26