Can I publish a book with hashes of common passwords?
<p>The title says it all. There are already thousands of online websites where you input a character string, and it would output the MD5 hash (or other) or the password.</p>
<p>I  was wondering about the legality of publishing a book with the, lets say, 100 or 1000 most commonly used passwords, together with their hash values.</p>
<p>Note that the book does not endorse/encourage password hacking in any way, it would just be a &quot;hash table&quot; of sorts, combining one kind of information with another.</p>
<p>So would it be legal to publish such a book?</p>

<p>Yes (in most jurisdictions), but why should you?</p>
<p>There might be some interests in publishing the 1,000 most common passwords, e.g. to support security awareness lectures (or to build <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table" rel="noreferrer">rainbow tables</a> for nefarious purposes), but anybody who wants to hash them with a specific algorithm can do so easily. It is probably easier to type the passwords from a printed book and to hash them on the computer than it is to type the hashed passwords -- bad passwords would tend to be easy to type.</p>
<p>That being said, computer crime laws are generally lagging behind the state of the art, or they are overly broad, so it might be illegal in some places as a &quot;hacking tool&quot; ...</p>

publishing