Can I publish a book with hashes of common passwords?

Question

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.

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.

Note that the book does not endorse/encourage password hacking in any way, it would just be a "hash table" of sorts, combining one kind of information with another.

So would it be legal to publish such a book?

Answer 1

Yes (in most jurisdictions), but why should you?

There might be some interests in publishing the 1,000 most common passwords, e.g. to support security awareness lectures (or to build rainbow tables 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.

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 "hacking tool" ...