Swiss researchers released details Tuesday on a way to speed the cracking of alphanumeric Windows passwords, reducing the time to break such codes to an average of 13.6 seconds. “Unix, Linux and the Mac OS X, however, add a 12-bit salt to the calculation, making any brute force attempt to break the encryption take 4,096 times longer or require 4,096 times more memory,” reports CNET News.com.