It has to do brute force strength. Against an MD5, it does pretty
poorly, benching about 440 Cracks per second on a K6-200 with 160 megs of
ram. (ram is irrelevant to be honest). I am guessing that say a gigahertz
processor might do a linear increase to about ~2000 Cracks per
second. This is pretty slow and has almost no chance to stop a good 8
character password.
With about 92 or so character choices for a password,
8^92 == 121.416E81. Or, a heck of a lot for a simple 8 character
password. Yes, with this number, it is impossible for one machine to do
this in a life time.
Note, few people put up good, strong passwords. If there is any
level of efficiency, we can cut this number down a lot.
On the side, Microsoft's Mighty NT Lan Man DES gets hit by an
astounding 90K cracks per second on a K6-200. Forget that, I believe
L0phtcrack lets you do 300-400K cracks per second on your slightly below
average processor of today and can do them in parallel. Maybe that is why
Microsoft is quickly dropping their Lanman Hash as they introduce Win2k as
the "champion server OS?"
However, I wonder if one can use programs like "john the ripper"
in parallel with other machines. With a "cracking" Athlon box running for
maybe $400 bucks, you can probably setup one nasty cluster to cut this down
to size. Although this may seem like a lot of trouble a hacker has to go
through, it is and it is not. If you give ANYONE an encrypted hash
guarding something really important, you can assume it will be cracked
within a life time and be used against you. (Another good reason why you
should rotate your passwords over a certain amount of time, but that of
course has other possible problems). Heck, it seems fairly reasonable for
a hacker to have a small cluster of Athlon boxes. I have quite a few PCs
at home.
As for practicality, one could argue most "script kiddies" are
unable to fathom even what I just wrote. However, a mere amateur or
professional hacker could easily wreck do this. Be careful if you have
sensitive information or enemies!
At 02:59 PM 10/21/01 -0400, Maissen Sacha wrote:
>Anh,
>Sorry for my question about your test below. This program "john the
>ripper", is
>it working with dictionaries or not? Because my question is, if I use
>passwords
>like "12eldkvi", which are not in any dics, how long you need then to
>crack a
>MD5-password?
>
>Regards
>Sacha
>
>-----Urspr|ngliche Nachricht-----
>Von: Anh Lam [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>Gesendet: Sonntag, 21. Oktober 2001 20:46
>An: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Betreff: Re: OT: Enable secret hacking [7:23670]
>
>
>Gareth,
>I create an "enable secret" password on a Cisco router 2610 with the
>password as you mentioned "kittens". Remember this is an MD5 encrypted
>string ($1$Em47$DEsFfXv/Px6y/cEmjMwfE0). You know what, I take this
>string
>and use the program called "john the ripper" running on my linux box to
>crack it. This linux is a pentium 200MHz with 64MB of RAM. It takes
>exactly 5 minutes to crack this password. I would imagine for longer
>"enable secret" password, it takes longer but not as difficult as it
>sounds.
>
>Regards,
-Carroll Kong
Message Posted at:
http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=23716&t=23670
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