Password Cracking in Practice

password recovery, GPU, hashcat

As more and more traffic and data on the Internet are being protected end-to-end, decrypting information becomes more critical than ever before. The presentation outlines password-cracking use-cases, employed formats,  current GPU/FPGA performance limits, and existing (non-)commercial cracking tools. Speaker will show how to: a) automatically extract hashes from encrypted documents; b) prepare and evaluate password keyspace (e.g., generate passwords using Markov chains /  rule-based grammars and handling of passwords containing national characters); c) orchestrate various cracking strategies (e.g., a  combination of dictionaries). Participants will be provided with tips and tricks on how to use Hashcat more effectively and how to distribute password cracking task on their infrastructure.