How long it would take a computer to crack your password? If your password or passphrase is 15 characters in length or longer, the LanManager hash of your password is no longer stored in Active Directory or in the local SAM accounts database (there is also a Group Policy option to enforce this, no matter what the length). LanManager hashes are easy to crack, so getting rid of them is good. About three years ago, developer Cameron Morris had a personal epiphany about passwords, he recently told ZDNetâs John Fontana: The time it takes to crack a password is the only true measure of.
Options menu of the random password generation tool in KeePass. Enabling more character subsets raises the strength of generated passwords a small amount, increasing the length raises the strength a large amount.
Password strength is a measure of the effectiveness of a password against guessing or brute-force attacks. In its usual form, it estimates how many trials an attacker who does not have direct access to the password would need, on average, to guess it correctly. The strength of a password is a function of length, complexity, and unpredictability.[1]
Using strong passwords lowers overall risk of a security breach, but strong passwords do not replace the need for other effective security controls. The effectiveness of a password of a given strength is strongly determined by the design and implementation of the factors (knowledge, ownership, inherence). The first factor is the main focus in this article.
The rate at which an attacker can submit guessed passwords to the system is a key factor in determining system security. Some systems impose a time-out of several seconds after a small number (e.g. three) of failed password entry attempts. In the absence of other vulnerabilities, such systems can be effectively secured with relatively simple passwords. However the system must store information about the user passwords in some form and if that information is stolen, say by breaching system security, the user passwords can be at risk.
In 2019, the United Kingdom's NCSC analysed public databases of breached accounts to see which words, phrases and strings people used. Top of the list was 123456, appearing in more than 23 million passwords. The second-most popular string, 123456789, was not much harder to crack, while others in the top five included 'qwerty', 'password' and 1111111.[2]
Password creation[edit]
Passwords are created either automatically (using randomizing equipment) or by a human; the latter case is more common. While the strength of randomly chosen passwords against a brute-force attack can be calculated with precision, determining the strength of human-generated passwords is challenging.
Typically, humans are asked to choose a password, sometimes guided by suggestions or restricted by a set of rules, when creating a new account for a computer system or Internet Web site. Only rough estimates of strength are possible, since humans tend to follow patterns in such tasks, and those patterns can usually assist an attacker.[3] In addition, lists of commonly chosen passwords are widely available for use by password guessing programs. Such lists include the numerous online dictionaries for various human languages, breached databases of plaintext and hashed passwords from various online business and social accounts, along with other common passwords. All items in such lists are considered weak, as are passwords that are simple modifications of them. For some decades, investigations of passwords on multi-user computer systems have shown that 40% or more[citation needed] are readily guessed using only computer programs, and more can be found when information about a particular user is taken into account during the attack.
Password guess validation[edit]
Systems that use passwords for authentication must have some way to check any password entered to gain access. If the valid passwords are simply stored in a system file or database, an attacker who gains sufficient access to the system will obtain all user passwords, giving the attacker access to all accounts on the attacked system, and possibly other systems where users employ the same or similar passwords. One way to reduce this risk is to store only a cryptographic hash of each password instead of the password itself. Standard cryptographic hashes, such as the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) series, are very hard to reverse, so an attacker who gets hold of the hash value cannot directly recover the password. However, knowledge of the hash value lets the attacker quickly test guesses offline. Password cracking programs are widely available that will test a large number of trial passwords against a purloined cryptographic hash.
Improvements in computing technology keep increasing the rate at which guessed passwords can be tested. For example, in 2010, the Georgia Tech Research Institute developed a method of using GPGPU to crack passwords much faster.[4]Elcomsoft invented the usage of common graphic cards for quicker password recovery in August 2007 and soon filed a corresponding patent in the US.[5] By 2011, commercial products were available that claimed the ability to test up to 112,000 passwords per second on a standard desktop computer, using a high-end graphics processor for that time.[6] Such a device will crack a 6 letter single-case password in one day. Note that the work can be distributed over many computers for an additional speedup proportional to the number of available computers with comparable GPUs. Special key stretching hashes are available that take a relatively long time to compute, reducing the rate at which guessing can take place. Although it is considered best practice to use key stretching, many common systems do not.
Another situation where quick guessing is possible is when the password is used to form a cryptographic key. In such cases, an attacker can quickly check to see if a guessed password successfully decodes encrypted data. For example, one commercial product claims to test 103,000 WPA PSK passwords per second.[7]
If a password system only stores the hash of the password, an attacker can pre-compute hash values for common passwords variants and for all passwords shorter than a certain length, allowing very rapid recovery of the password once its hash is obtained. Very long lists of pre-computed password hashes can be efficiently stored using rainbow tables. This method of attack can be foiled by storing a random value, called a cryptographic salt, along with the hash. The salt is combined with the password when computing the hash, so an attacker precomputing a rainbow table would have to store for each password its hash with every possible salt value. This becomes infeasible if the salt has a big enough range, say a 32-bit number. Unfortunately, many authentication systems in common use do not employ salts and rainbow tables are available on the Internet for several such systems.
Entropy as a measure of password strength[edit]
It is usual in the computer industry to specify password strength in terms of information entropy which is measured in bits and is a concept from information theory. Instead of the number of guesses needed to find the password with certainty, the base-2 logarithm of that number is given, which is commonly referred to as the number of 'entropy bits' in a password, though this is not exactly the same quantity as information entropy.[8]Canon user manuals pdf. A password with an entropy of 42 bits calculated in this way would be as strong as a string of 42 bits chosen randomly, for example by a fair coin toss. Put another way, a password with an entropy of 42 bits would require 242 (4,398,046,511,104) attempts to exhaust all possibilities during a brute force search. Thus, by increasing the entropy of the password by one bit the number of guesses required doubles, making an attacker's task twice as difficult. On average, an attacker will have to try half the possible number of passwords before finding the correct one.[3]
Random passwords[edit]
Random passwords consist of a string of symbols of specified length taken from some set of symbols using a random selection process in which each symbol is equally likely to be selected. The symbols can be individual characters from a character set (e.g., the ASCII character set), syllables designed to form pronounceable passwords, or even words from a word list (thus forming a passphrase).
The strength of random passwords depends on the actual entropy of the underlying number generator; however, these are often not truly random, but pseudo random. Many publicly available password generators use random number generators found in programming libraries that offer limited entropy. However most modern operating systems offer cryptographically strong random number generators that are suitable for password generation. It is also possible to use ordinary dice to generate random passwords. See stronger methods. Random password programs often have the ability to ensure that the resulting password complies with a local password policy; for instance, by always producing a mix of letters, numbers and special characters.
For passwords generated by a process that randomly selects a string of symbols of length, L, from a set of N possible symbols, the number of possible passwords can be found by raising the number of symbols to the power L, i.e. NL. Increasing either L or N will strengthen the generated password. The strength of a random password as measured by the information entropy is just the base-2 logarithm or log2 of the number of possible passwords, assuming each symbol in the password is produced independently. Thus a random password's information entropy, H, is given by the formula
where N is the number of possible symbols and L is the number of symbols in the password. H is measured in bits.[3][9] In the last expression, log can be to any base.
A binarybyte is usually expressed using two hexadecimal characters.
To find the length, L, needed to achieve a desired strength H, with a password drawn randomly from a set of N symbols, one computes
The following table uses this formula to show the required lengths of truly randomly generated passwords to achieve desired password entropies for common symbol sets:
Human-generated passwords[edit]
People are notoriously poor at achieving sufficient entropy to produce satisfactory passwords. According to one study involving half a million users, the average password entropy was estimated at 40.54 bits.[10] Some stage magicians exploit this inability for amusement, in a minor way, by divining supposed random choices (of numbers, say) made by audience members.
Thus, in one analysis of over 3 million eight-character passwords, the letter 'e' was used over 1.5 million times, while the letter 'f' was used only 250,000 times. A uniform distribution would have had each character being used about 900,000 times. The most common number used is '1', whereas the most common letters are a, e, o, and r.[11]
Users rarely make full use of larger character sets in forming passwords. For example, hacking results obtained from a MySpace phishing scheme in 2006 revealed 34,000 passwords, of which only 8.3% used mixed case, numbers, and symbols.[12]
The full strength associated with using the entire ASCII character set (numerals, mixed case letters and special characters) is only achieved if each possible password is equally likely. This seems to suggest that all passwords must contain characters from each of several character classes, perhaps upper and lower case letters, numbers, and non-alphanumeric characters. In fact, such a requirement is a pattern in password choice and can be expected to reduce an attacker's 'work factor' (in Claude Shannon's terms). This is a reduction in password 'strength'. A better requirement would be to require a password NOT to contain any word in an online dictionary, or list of names, or any license plate pattern from any state (in the US) or country (as in the EU). If patterned choices are required, humans are likely to use them in predictable ways, such a capitalizing a letter, adding one or two numbers, and a special character. This predictability means that the increase in password strength is minor when compared to random passwords.
NIST Special Publication 800-63-2[edit]
NIST Special Publication 800-63 of June 2004 (revision 2) suggested the following scheme to roughly estimate the entropy of human-generated passwords:[3]
Using this scheme, an eight-character human-selected password without upper case letters and non-alphabetic characters is estimated to have 18 bits of entropy. The NIST publication concedes that at the time of development, little information was available on the real world selection of passwords.
Later research into human-selected password entropy using newly available real world data has demonstrated that the NIST scheme does not provide a valid metric for entropy estimation of human-selected passwords.[13] The June 2017 revision of SP 800-63 (Revision 3) drops this approach.[14]
Usability and implementation considerations[edit]
Because national keyboard implementations vary, not all 94 ASCII printable characters can be used everywhere. This can present a problem to an international traveler who wished to log into remote system using a keyboard on a local computer. Seekeyboard layout. Many hand held devices, such as tablet computers and smart phones, require complex shift sequences to enter special characters.
Authentication programs vary in which characters they allow in passwords. Some do not recognize case differences (e.g., the upper-case 'E' is considered equivalent to the lower-case 'e'), others prohibit some of the other symbols. In the past few decades, systems have permitted more characters in passwords, but limitations still exist. Systems also vary in the maximum length of passwords allowed.
As a practical matter, passwords must be both reasonable and functional for the end user as well as strong enough for the intended purpose. Passwords that are too difficult to remember may be forgotten and so are more likely to be written on paper, which some consider a security risk.[15] In contrast, others argue that forcing users to remember passwords without assistance can only accommodate weak passwords, and thus poses a greater security risk. According to Bruce Schneier, most people are good at securing their wallets or purses, which is a 'great place' to store a written password.[16]
Required bits of entropy[edit]
The minimum number of bits of entropy needed for a password depends on the threat model for the given application. If key stretching is not used, passwords with more entropy are needed. RFC 4086, 'Randomness Requirements for Security', presents some example threat models and how to calculate the entropy desired for each one.[17] Their answers vary between 29 bits of entropy needed if only online attacks are expected, and up to 96 bits of entropy needed for important cryptographic keys used in applications like encryption where the password or key needs to be secure for a long period of time and stretching isn't applicable. A 2010 Georgia Tech Research Institute study based on unstretched keys recommended a 12-character random password, but as a minimum length requirement.[4][18]
The upper end is related to the stringent requirements of choosing keys used in encryption. In 1999, an Electronic Frontier Foundation project broke 56-bit DES encryption in less than a day using specially designed hardware.[19] In 2002, distributed.net cracked a 64-bit key in 4 years, 9 months, and 23 days.[20] As of October 12, 2011, distributed.net estimates that cracking a 72-bit key using current hardware will take about 45,579 days or 124.8 years.[21] Due to currently understood limitations from fundamental physics, there is no expectation that any digital computer (or combination) will be capable of breaking 256-bit encryption via a brute-force attack.[22] Whether or not quantum computers will be able to do so in practice is still unknown, though theoretical analysis suggests such possibilities.[23]
Guidelines for strong passwords[edit]Common guidelines[edit]
Guidelines for choosing good passwords are typically designed to make passwords harder to discover by intelligent guessing. Common guidelines advocated by proponents of software system security include:[24][25][26][27][28]
Some guidelines advise against writing passwords down, while others, noting the large numbers of password protected systems users must access, encourage writing down passwords as long as the written password lists are kept in a safe place, not attached to a monitor or in an unlocked desk drawer.[29] Use of a Password Manager is recommended by the NCSC.[30]
The possible character set for a password can be constrained by different web sites or by the range of keyboards on which the password must be entered.[31]
Examples of weak passwords[edit]
As with any security measure, passwords vary in effectiveness (i.e., strength); some are weaker than others. For example, the difference in weakness between a dictionary word and a word with obfuscation (i.e., letters in the password are substituted by, say, numbers â a common approach) may cost a password cracking device a few more seconds; this adds little strength. The examples below illustrate various ways weak passwords might be constructed, all of which are based on simple patterns which result in extremely low entropy, allowing them to be tested automatically at high speeds.:[11]
There are many other ways a password can be weak,[34] corresponding to the strengths of various attack schemes; the core principle is that a password should have high entropy (usually taken to be equivalent to randomness) and not be readily derivable by any 'clever' pattern, nor should passwords be mixed with information identifying the user. On-line services often provide a restore password function that a hacker can figure out and by doing so bypass a password. Choosing hard-to-guess restore password questions can further secure the password.[35]
Rethinking password change guidelines[edit]
In December, 2012, William Cheswick wrote an article published in ACM magazine that included the mathematical possibilities of how easy or difficult it would be to break passwords that are constructed using the commonly recommended, and sometimes followed, standards of today. In his article, William showed that a standard eight character alpha-numeric password could withstand a brute force attack of ten million attempts per second, and remain unbroken for 252 days. Ten million attempts each second is the acceptable rate of attempts using a multi-core system that most users would have access to. A much greater degree of attempts, at the rate of 7 billion per second, could also be achieved when using modern GPUs. At this rate, the same 8 character alpha-numeric password could be broken in approximately 30 seconds. Increasing the password complexity to a 13 character alpha-numeric password increases the time needed to crack it to more than 900,000 years at 7 billion attempts per second. This is, of course, assuming the password does not use a common word that a dictionary attack could break much sooner. Using a password of this strength reduces the obligation to change it as often as many organizations require, including the U.S. Government, as it could not be reasonably broken in such a short period of time.[36]
Password policy[edit]
A password policy is a guide to choosing satisfactory passwords. It is intended to:
For example, password expiration is often covered by password policies. Password expiration serves two purposes:[37]
However, password expiration has its drawbacks:[38][39]
Creating and handling passwords[edit]
The hardest passwords to crack, for a given length and character set, are random character strings; if long enough they resist brute force attacks (because there are many characters) and guessing attacks (due to high entropy). However, such passwords are typically the hardest to remember. The imposition of a requirement for such passwords in a password policy may encourage users to write them down, store them in mobile devices, or share them with others as a safeguard against memory failure. While some people consider each of these user resorts to increase security risks, others suggest the absurdity of expecting users to remember distinct complex passwords for each of the dozens of accounts they access. For example, in 2005, security expert Bruce Schneier recommended writing down one's password:
Simply, people can no longer remember passwords good enough to reliably defend against dictionary attacks, and are much more secure if they choose a password too complicated to remember and then write it down. We're all good at securing small pieces of paper. I recommend that people write their passwords down on a small piece of paper, and keep it with their other valuable small pieces of paper: in their wallet.[29]
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The following measures may increase acceptance of strong password requirements, if carefully used:
Memory techniques[edit]Time To Crack Password By Length
Password policies sometimes suggest memory techniques to assist remembering passwords:
Protecting passwords[edit]
Computer users are generally advised to 'never write down a password anywhere, no matter what' and 'never use the same password for more than one account.'[47] However, an ordinary computer user may have dozens of password-protected accounts. Users with multiple accounts needing passwords often give up and use the same password for every account. When varied password complexity requirements prevent use of the same (memorable) scheme for producing high-strength passwords, oversimplified passwords will often be created to satisfy irritating and conflicting password requirements.A Microsoft expert was quoted as saying at a 2005 security conference: 'I claim that password policy should say you should write down your password. I have 68 different passwords. If I am not allowed to write any of them down, guess what I am going to do? I am going to use the same password on every one of them.'[48]
Software is available for popular hand-held computers that can store passwords for numerous accounts in encrypted form. Passwords can be encrypted by hand on paper and remember the encryption method and key.[49] And another approach is to use a single password or slightly varying passwords for low-security accounts and select distinctly separate strong passwords for a smaller number of high-value applications such as for online banking.
A single 'master' password can be used with software to generate a new password for each application, based on the master password and the application's name. This approach is used by Stanford's PwdHash,[50] Princeton's Password Multiplier,[51] and other stateless password managers. In this approach, protecting the master password is essential, as all passwords are compromised if the master password is revealed, and lost if the master password is forgotten or misplaced.
Password managers[edit]
A reasonable compromise for using large numbers of passwords is to record them in a password manager program, which include stand-alone applications, web browser extensions, or a manager built into the operating system. A password manager allows the user to use hundreds of different passwords, and only have to remember a single password, the one which opens the encrypted password database. Needless to say, this single password should be strong and well-protected (not recorded anywhere). Most password managers can automatically create strong passwords using a cryptographically secure random password generator, as well as calculating the entropy of the generated password. A good password manager will provide resistance against attacks such as key logging, clipboard logging and various other memory spying techniques.
See also[edit]References[edit]
External links[edit]
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Password_strength&oldid=919026651'
In cryptanalysis and computer security, password cracking is the process of recovering passwords from data that have been stored in or transmitted by a computer system. A common approach (brute-force attack) is to repeatedly try guesses for the password and to check them against an available cryptographic hash of the password.[1]
The purpose of password cracking might be to help a user recover a forgotten password (installing an entirely new password is less of a security risk, but it involves System Administration privileges), to gain unauthorized access to a system, or a preventive measure by system administrators to check for easily crackable passwords. On a file-by-file basis, password cracking is utilized to gain access to digital evidence to which a judge has allowed access, when a particular file's permissions are restricted.
Time needed for password searches[edit]
The time to crack a password is related to bit strength (seepassword strength), which is a measure of the password's entropy, and the details of how the password is stored. Most methods of password cracking require the computer to produce many candidate passwords, each of which is checked. One example is brute-force cracking, in which a computer tries every possible key or password until it succeeds. More common methods of password cracking, such as dictionary attacks, pattern checking, word list substitution, etc. attempt to reduce the number of trials required and will usually be attempted before brute force. Higher password bit strength exponentially increases the number of candidate passwords that must be checked, on average, to recover the password and reduces the likelihood that the password will be found in any cracking dictionary.[2]
The ability to crack passwords using computer programs is also a function of the number of possible passwords per second which can be checked. If a hash of the target password is available to the attacker, this number can be in the billions or trillions per second, since an offline attack is possible. If not, the rate depends on whether the authentication software limits how often a password can be tried, either by time delays, CAPTCHAs, or forced lockouts after some number of failed attempts. Another situation where quick guessing is possible is when the password is used to form a cryptographic key. In such cases, an attacker can quickly check to see if a guessed password successfully decodes encrypted data.
For some kinds of password hash, ordinary desktop computers can test over a hundred million passwords per second using password cracking tools running on a general purpose CPU and billions of passwords per second using GPU-based password cracking tools[3][4][5] (See: John the Ripper benchmarks).[6] The rate of password guessing depends heavily on the cryptographic function used by the system to generate password hashes. A suitable password hashing function, such as bcrypt, is many orders of magnitude better than a naive function like simple MD5 or SHA. A user-selected eight-character password with numbers, mixed case, and symbols, with commonly selected passwords and other dictionary matches filtered out, reaches an estimated 30-bit strength, according to NIST. 230 is only one billion permutations[7] and would be cracked in seconds if the hashing function is naive. When ordinary desktop computers are combined in a cracking effort, as can be done with botnets, the capabilities of password cracking are considerably extended. In 2002, distributed.net successfully found a 64-bit RC5 key in four years, in an effort which included over 300,000 different computers at various times, and which generated an average of over 12 billion keys per second.[8]
Graphics processors can speed up password cracking by a factor of 50 to 100 over general purpose computers. As of 2011, available commercial products claim the ability to test up to 2,800,000,000 passwords a second on a standard desktop computer using a high-end graphics processor.[9] Such a device can crack a 10 letter single-case password in one day. The work can be distributed over many computers for an additional speedup proportional to the number of available computers with comparable GPUs.[citation needed]
The emergence of hardware acceleration over the past decade GPU resources to be used to increase the efficiency and speed of a brute force attack. In 2012, Stricture Consulting Group unveiled a 25-GPU cluster that achieved a brute force attack speed of 350 billion guesses per second, allowing them to check 958{textstyle 95^{8}}password combinations in 5.5 hours. Using ocl-Hashcat Plus on a Virtual OpenCL cluster platform, the Linux-based GPU cluster was used to 'crack 90 percent of the 6.5 million password hashes belonging to users of LinkedIn.'[10]
Despite their capabilities, desktop CPUs are slower at cracking passwords than purpose-built password breaking machines. In 1998, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) built a dedicated password cracker using ASICs, as opposed to general purpose CPUs. Their machine, Deep Crack, broke a DES 56-bit key in 56 hours, testing over 90 billion keys per second.[11] In 2010, the Georgia Tech Research Institute developed a method of using GPGPU to crack passwords, coming up with a minimum secure password length of 12 characters.[12][13][14]
Easy to remember, hard to guess[edit]
Passwords that are difficult to remember will reduce the security of a system because (a) users might need to write down or electronically store the password using an insecure method, (b) users will need frequent password resets and (c) users are more likely to re-use the same password. Similarly, the more stringent requirements for password strength, e.g. 'have a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters and digits' or 'change it monthly', the greater the degree to which users will subvert the system.[15]
In 'The Memorability and Security of Passwords',[16] Jeff Yan et al. examines the effect of advice given to users about a good choice of password. They found that passwords based on thinking of a phrase and taking the first letter of each word are just as memorable as naively selected passwords, and just as hard to crack as randomly generated passwords. Combining two unrelated words is another good method. Having a personally designed 'algorithm' for generating obscure passwords is another good method.
However, asking users to remember a password consisting of a 'mix of uppercase and lowercase characters' is similar to asking them to remember a sequence of bits: hard to remember, and only a little bit harder to crack (e.g. only 128 times harder to crack for 7-letter passwords, less if the user simply capitalizes one of the letters). Asking users to use 'both letters and digits' will often lead to easy-to-guess substitutions such as 'E' â '3' and 'I' â '1', substitutions which are well known to attackers. Similarly typing the password one keyboard row higher is a common trick known to attackers.
Research detailed in an April 2015 paper by several professors at Carnegie Mellon University shows that people's choices of password structure often follow several known patterns. As a result, passwords may be much more easily cracked than their mathematical probabilities would otherwise indicate. Passwords containing one digit, for example, disproportionately include it at the end of the password.[17]
Incidents[edit]
On July 16, 1998, CERT reported an incident where an attacker had found 186,126 encrypted passwords. By the time they were discovered, they had already cracked 47,642 passwords.[18]
In December 2009, a major password breach of the Rockyou.com website occurred that led to the release of 32 million passwords. The attacker then leaked the full list of the 32 million passwords (with no other identifiable information) to the internet. Passwords were stored in cleartext in the database and were extracted through a SQL Injection vulnerability. The Imperva Application Defense Center (ADC) did an analysis on the strength of the passwords.[19]
In June 2011, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) experienced a security breach that led to the public release of first and last names, usernames, and passwords for more than 11,000 registered users of their e-bookshop. The data were leaked as part of Operation AntiSec, a movement that includes Anonymous, LulzSec, as well as other hacking groups and individuals.[20]
On July 11, 2011, Booz Allen Hamilton, a large American Consulting firm that does a substantial amount of work for the Pentagon, had their servers hacked by Anonymous and leaked the same day. 'The leak, dubbed 'Military Meltdown Monday,' includes 90,000 logins of military personnelâincluding personnel from USCENTCOM, SOCOM, the Marine Corps, various Air Force facilities, Homeland Security, State Department staff, and what looks like private sector contractors.'[21] These leaked passwords wound up being hashed with unsaltedSHA-1, and were later analyzed by the ADC team at Imperva, revealing that even some military personnel used passwords as weak as '1234'.[22]
On July 18, 2011, Microsoft Hotmail banned the password: '123456'.[23]
In July 2015, a group calling itself 'The Impact Team' stole the user data of Ashley Madison. Many passwords were hashed using both the relatively strong bcrypt algorithm and the weaker MD5 hash. Attacking the latter algorithm allowed some 11 million plaintext passwords to be recovered.
Prevention[edit]
The best method of preventing a password from being cracked is to ensure that attackers cannot get access even to the hashed password. For example, on the Unixoperating system, hashed passwords were originally stored in a publicly accessible file /etc/passwd. On modern Unix (and similar) systems, on the other hand, they are stored in the shadow password file /etc/shadow, which is accessible only to programs running with enhanced privileges (i.e., 'system' privileges). This makes it harder for a malicious user to obtain the hashed passwords in the first instance, however many collections of password hashes have been stolen despite such protection. Another strong approach is to combine a site-specific secret key with the password hash, which prevents plaintext password recovery even if the hashed values are purloined. A third approach is to use key derivation functions that reduce the rate at which passwords can be guessed.[24]:5.1.1.2Unfortunately, many common Network Protocols transmit passwords in cleartext or use weak challenge/response schemes.[25][26]
Modern Unix Systems have replaced traditional DES-based password hashing function crypt() with stronger methods such as bcrypt and scrypt.[27] Other systems have also begun to adopt these methods. For instance, the Cisco IOS originally used a reversible Vigenère cipher to encrypt passwords, but now uses md5-crypt with a 24-bit salt when the 'enable secret' command is used.[28] These newer methods use large salt values which prevent attackers from efficiently mounting offline attacks against multiple user accounts simultaneously. The algorithms are also much slower to execute which drastically increases the time required to mount a successful offline attack.[29]
Many hashes used for storing passwords, such as MD5 and the SHA family, are designed for fast computation and efficient implementation in hardware. As a result, they are ineffective in preventing password cracking, especially with methods like rainbow tables. Using key stretching Algorithms, such as PBKDF2, to form password hashes can significantly reduce the rate at which passwords can be tested.
Solutions like a security token give a formal proof answer by constantly shifting password. Those solutions abruptly reduce the timeframe for brute forcing (attacker needs to break and use the password within a single shift) and they reduce the value of the stolen passwords because of its short time validity.
In 2013 a long-term Password Hashing Competition was announced to choose a new, standard algorithm for password hashing.[30]
Software[edit]
There are many password cracking software tools, but the most popular[31] are Aircrack, Cain and Abel, John the Ripper, Hashcat, Hydra, DaveGrohl and ElcomSoft. Many litigation support software packages also include password cracking functionality. Most of these packages employ a mixture of cracking strategies, algorithm with brute force and dictionary attacks proving to be the most productive.[citation needed]
The increased availability of computing power and beginner friendly automated password cracking software for a number of protection schemes has allowed the activity to be taken up by script kiddies.[32]
See also[edit]References[edit]Password Length Time To Crack Youtube
External links[edit]Password Length Time To Crack Full
Password Length Time To Crack 2019
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Password_cracking&oldid=919056757'
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