Password Cracking
on a Budget
Matt Weir
Dr. Sudhir Aggarwal
Florida State University
Special Thanks To
Bill Glodek
Professor Breno de Medeiros
National Institute of Justice
About Me
Name - Matt Weir
Occupation - PhD Student, Florida State
University
Previously worked for Northrop Grumman
TASC
- Network Security Engineer
- Last project I supported forensic investigators
working with the JTF-GNO
Disclosed Password - xcom
- Real strong, right?
Disclaimer
Im a student. I dont crack passwords
for a living
Ive been wrong about many things
before
Ive probably made just about every
mistake possible while learning how
to crack passwords
Ive been known to write passwords
down
How this will be Different
from the Shmoocon Talk
What! I cant just use the same slides?
The Shmoocon talk focused on three main areas
- The ethics of password cracking
- Where we get disclosed password lists to do
research on
- Our analysis of those password lists and an
overview of how people actually create passwords
You can see a video of that talk + slides at
www.shmoocon.org
This is Defcon
All that information is neat but...
- How do you go about applying this
in real life?
- Without having to spend a lot of
money
- Note: That being said, having money
to throw around makes things a lot
easier
Because this is a 50
minute talk...
Ill be available to answer questions,
go into more detail, rant, and listen to
better ideas afterwards
You can also e-mail me
-
[email protected] Its important to me that this research
actually helps somebody
Getting the Tools
Weve developed a lot of custom tools
and scripts to make cracking
passwords easier
While they are included on the Defcon
CD, you can get the most up to date
versions at the following website
www.ecit.fsu.edu
- Select Password Recovery Tools
Password Basics
I want to avoid giving
everyone a CISSP prep
course on password
cracking
That being said, if you
have questions, please
ask them
Two types of password
cracking
Online
- Trying different passwords to log in
- Can be slow and noisy
- You may only be allowed a few guesses
Offline
You grabbed the password file
You now are only limited by how fast your
computer is
Password Hashes
Hopefully your computer, website,
online bank, does not keep your
passwords in plain text
If it does, then there isnt much need
to crack any passwords once someone
grabs the password list
Password Hashes
(continued)
Step 1) User creates password :
password
Step 2) Computer Hashes the password
MD5(password) =
5F4DCC3B5AA765D61D8327DEB882CF99
Step 3) To log in the user types password
Step 4) The computer hashes password and
compares it against the hash it stored
Salts
Salts are a value added to a
password to make it harder
to crack
For example, you could add
the username
MD5(bob+password)
3690eb69b329e009ecd053e27e7454b5
MD5(tom+password)
4125d856a8860ebf67e1fbad03167452
The Brick Wall
There are usually two
factors that can stop
you from cracking a
password
You dont try the right
dictionary word
You dont try the right
word mangling rule
A Quick Break to Kick off
a few Demos
Text
Graph stolen from indexed.blogspot.com
So you hit the wall...
Do you try more wordlists?
- Unless you are very careful, this can
result in a lot of wasted work as wordlists
often have significant overlap
Do you try more word mangling rules
- Advanced word mangling rules often
start to resemble brute force.
Lets Talk about Wordlists
Very important when
cracking passwords
Boring as Hell
Common Places to Find
Wordlists
http://www.word-list.com/
http://www.outpost9.com/files/
WordLists.html
www.theargon.com/achilles/wordlists/
theargonlists
Xploits Master Password Collection on
Bittorrent
Creating Better Wordlists
The wordlists you find online leave a
lot to be desired
David Smith at Georgetown University
is doing some really good work at
creating wordlists off of hard drive
images
Creating wordlists by hand based on
online info is a pain, but effective
The Care and Feeding of
Wordlists
Try and avoid duplicate words
How are the words terminated?
Standardize capitalization
How many artifacts does the wordlist
have?
Is the word length important?
Some of our Work with
Wordlists
Wiktionary grabber
- Creates language specific word lists
Wikipedia grabber
- Attempts to create custom wordlists
based upon search criteria
- Still needs a lot of work
Judging Dictionaries
Based on Edit Distance
We originally created customized
dictionaries based on grabbing the
alpha characters from disclosed
password lists, (and making some
assumptions)
- P@ssword12 = password
- *stuff* = stuff
- firewa11 = firewa (Problem)
Edit Distance (Continued)
Look at the edit distance between a
password and an input dictionary
Cons:
- Can produce false positives and negatives
- Only as good as the input dictionary
Pros:
- Produces useful custom wordlists
- Quickly evaluates how good current
wordlists are
Evaluation of
Dictionaries vs. Myspace
dic-0294
common-password.txt
Description: Really BIG Dictionary
Percentage Found: 5.3%
Percentage Found: 49.9%
Size: 816 Words
Size: 869,228 Words
words.english.txt
Wiktionary English Words
Percentage Found: 10.6%
Percentage Found: 32%
Size: 213,557 Words
Size: 68,611 Words
Time to Check in on our
Demos
Word Mangling Rules
Generally what people
focus on in password
cracking
Most password crackers
are fairly limited in their
rule sets
LANMAN hashes spoiled
us
Word Mangling Rules +
Teamwork = Hard
Its easy to crack passwords created with
only one mangling rule
The trick is dealing with passwords that
use more than one mangling rule
- P@ssWord12
Or they use a nonstandard rule
- p7assword
Cain and Able vs
John the Ripper
They are the two
major free password
crackers out there
Which one should
you use?
Answer:
- John the Ripper
Why not Cain and Able?
Getting the Most out of
John the Ripper
Install the unofficial patches if you
need support for other types of hashes
Do NOT use the default john.config file
- Its a pain, but learning the rule
syntax is very useful
- The RULES readme file is your
friend
Brute Force with John
By default, JtR uses Markov models to
generate brute force guesses
- You can actually train the Markov
model based on passwords you
already have
- Warning: it does require a lot of
passwords to train it
Targeted Brute Force
Often you will want to brute force
certain types of passwords
AKA six letters followed by two numbers
You can do this in John, but its a bit of a
hack
Targetd Brute Force
(continued)
Create a input wordlist of a-z
aka a b c d e f g ..... z
Now create a rule to add all the other values
$[a-z]$[a-z]$[a-z]$[a-z]$[0-9]$[0-9]
You can even get fancy and apply some
Markov models of your own
Probabilistic Context
Free Grammar
Guess which project we are writing a
paper on
In a nutshell, it allows you to define
very detailed rules easily
It assigns a probability to every word
mangling rule, number, word,
capitalization, special character, etc
PCFG Password Crackers
(continued)
It is trained off of existing password lists
This way, depending on the probabilities, it might try
the following guesses in this order
- password12
- password!
- password13
You can simulate it to a certain extent by creating
100s, (or 1000s) of rules in John the Ripper
Using our PCFG
Password Cracker
It currently makes guesses and
outputs them to stdout
Pipe the guesses into JtR since we
didnt want to write our own hashing /
management software
It does have some overhead, but going
against strong hashes its not
significant
Gotta Have at Least One
Graph
Measures the
performance of the
default JtR rule set vs
our PCFG
X-axis=number of
guesses
Y-axis=number of
found passwords
Check Final Results of
Demo
Picture stolen from xkcd.com
Questions / Comments
Matt Weir
[email protected]
www.ecit.fsu.edu
Picture stolen from marriedtothesea.com
