Cracking Windows Passwords faster

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Wed, 07/23/2003 - 12:42 — Christoph C. Cemper

Cracking Windows passwords in seconds with a 1.5 Gigabyte Lookuptable seams easy…

Quote:

“Swiss researchers released a paper on Tuesday outlining a way to speed the cracking of alphanumeric Windows passwords, reducing the time to break such codes to an average of 13.6 seconds from 1 minute 41 seconds.

The method involves using large lookup tables to match encoded passwords to the original text entered by a user, thus speeding the calculations required to break the codes. Called a time-memory trade-off, the situation means that an attacker with an abundance of computer memory can reduce the time it takes to break a secret code.

The whole test-setup was a simple Athlon 2500 Mhz PC – well and a 1.5 Gigabyte lookuptable is not endless much memory – current computer games have this size typically. The only difference is 1.5 GB Ram for caching is non-standard, but costs you like 200-300 EUR I guess.

I just wonder where to download this stuff… but they have a cool Advanced Instant NT Password Cracker demo online!

Quote:

Including other symbols besides alphanumeric characters adds complexity to the process of breaking passwords and that means the cracker needs more time or more memory or both.

mmmh… but Scientist Oechslin has even created a new version of his program using 20GB of lookup tables that can break passwords made of numbers, letters and 16 other characters in an average of 30 seconds for large batches of passwords… dammit… we need Secure-ID and other techniques for authentication nowadays or will have massive security leaks sooner or later…

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Sat, 08/30/2003 - 17:18 — Pranav (not verified)