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Question

Difficulty: EasyDevice Access Control and Local Password Authentication

A network administrator inspects a Cisco IOS router configuration and observes the following line:

`username admin privilege 15 secret 9 99 eG8H$kQzP8xY...`

Which encryption algorithm or password type is used to secure the password for this local account?

  1. scrypt (Type 9)Answer
  2. B
    PBKDF2 with SHA-256 (Type 8)
  3. C
    MD5 hash (Type 5)
  4. D
    Cisco proprietary reversible cipher (Type 7)

Answer

The scrypt algorithm (Type 9) is used to hash the password.
In Cisco IOS software, configuring a password with the 'secret 9' keyword applies the scrypt hashing algorithm to protect the local credential in the running configuration.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Examine the CLI syntax from the running configuration line.
The CLI keyword 'secret 9' and the identifier '99' specify the exact password algorithm type.
Cisco IOS explicitly maps numeric type identifiers to specific hash algorithms.
2
Correlate the Cisco IOS password type number to its algorithm.
Type 9 corresponds to the scrypt password-hashing algorithm.
scrypt was introduced in Cisco IOS to provide stronger security than legacy Type 5 (MD5) and Type 7 (Vigenère) methods.

Key Concept

Cisco IOS Local Password Hashing Types
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Topics

Device Access Control and Local Password Authentication

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