What is Password Cracking?
Password cracking is the process of attempting to gain Unauthorized access to restricted systems using common passwords or algorithms that guess passwords. In other words, it’s an art of obtaining the correct password that gives access to a system protected by an authentication method.
Password cracking employs a number of techniques to achieve its goals. The cracking process can involve either comparing stored passwords against word list or use algorithms to generate passwords that match
In this Tutorial, we will introduce you to the common password cracking techniques and the countermeasures you can implement to protect systems against such attacks.
Topics covered in this tutorial
- What is password strength?
- Password cracking techniques
- Password Cracking Tools
- Password Cracking Counter Measures
- Hacking Assignment: Hack Now!
What is password strength?
Password strength is the measure of a password’s efficiency to resist password cracking attacks. The strength of a password is determined by;
- Length: the number of characters the password contains.
- Complexity: does it use a combination of letters, numbers, and symbol?
- Unpredictability: is it something that can be guessed easily by an attacker?
Let’s now look at a practical example. We will use three passwords namely
1. password
2. password1
3. #password1$
For this example, we will use the password strength indicator of Cpanel when creating passwords. The images below show the password strengths of each of the above-listed passwords.
Note: the password used is password the strength is 1, and it’s very weak.
Note: the password used is password1 the strength is 28, and it’s still weak.
Note: The password used is #password1$ the strength is 60 and it’s strong.
The higher the strength number, better the password.
Let’s suppose that we have to store our above passwords using md5 encryption. We will use an online md5 hash generator to convert our passwords into md5 hashes.
The table below shows the password hashes
| Password | MD5 Hash | Cpanel Strength Indicator |
|---|---|---|
| password | 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99 | 1 |
| password1 | 7c6a180b36896a0a8c02787eeafb0e4c | 28 |
| #password1$ | 29e08fb7103c327d68327f23d8d9256c | 60 |
We will now use http://www.md5this.com/ to crack the above hashes. The images below show the password cracking results for the above passwords.
As you can see from the above results, we managed to crack the first and second passwords that had lower strength numbers. We didn’t manage to crack the third password which was longer, complex and unpredictable. It had a higher strength number.
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