LM Hash - Reasons For Continued Use

Reasons For Continued Use

Many legacy third party CIFS implementations have taken considerable time to add support for the stronger protocols that Microsoft has created to replace LM hashing because the open source communities supporting these libraries first had to reverse engineer the newer protocols—Samba took 5 years to add NTLMv2 support, while JCIFS took 10 years.

Availability of NTLM protocols to replace LM authentication
Product NTLMv1 support NTLMv2 support
Windows NT 3.1 RTM (1993) Not supported
Windows NT 3.5 RTM (1994) Not supported
Windows NT 3.51 RTM (1995) Not supported
Windows NT 4 RTM (1996) Service Pack 4 (25 October 1998)
Windows 95 Not supported Directory services client (released with Windows 2000 Server, 17 February 2000)
Windows 98 RTM Directory services client (released with Windows 2000 Server, 17 February 2000)
Windows 2000 RTM (17 February 2000) RTM (17 February 2000)
Windows ME RTM (14 September 2000) Directory services client (released with Windows 2000 Server, 17 February 2000)
Samba ? Version 3.0 (24 September 2003)
JCIFS Not supported Version 1.3.0 (25 October 2008)
IBM AIX (SMBFS) 5.3 (2004) Not supported as of v7.1

Poor patching regimes subsequent to software releases supporting the feature becoming available have contributed to some organisations continuing to use LM Hashing in their environments, even though the protocol is easily disabled in Active Directory itself.

Lastly, prior to the release of Windows Vista, many unattended build processes still used a DOS boot disk (instead of Windows PE) to start the installation of Windows using WINNT.EXE, something that requires LM hashing to be enabled for the legacy LAN Manager networking stack to work.

Read more about this topic:  LM Hash

Famous quotes containing the words reasons for, reasons and/or continued:

    Write to the point: say immediately what you want to say most, even if it doesn’t “come first.” There are three reasons for doing this. First, you will then have said it, even if nothing else gets said. Second, your readers will then have read it, even if they read no more. Third, having said it, you are likely to have to say something more, because you will have to explain and justify what you chose to say.
    Bill Stott (b. 1940)

    Man has lost the basic skill of the ape, the ability to scratch its back. Which gave it extraordinary independence, and the liberty to associate for reasons other than the need for mutual back-scratching.
    Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)

    The Sound of battle fell upon my ear & heart all day yesterday—even after dark the cannon’s insatiate roar continued ...
    Elizabeth Blair Lee (1818–?)