john-users - Re: keyspace, mask password and dumb bruteforce

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Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 10:23:33 +0100
From: bartavelle@...quise.net
To: john-users@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: keyspace, mask password and dumb bruteforce

Steve Bergman a écrit :
> I'm no expert. But it seems to me that this is a problem where a little 
> finesse is worth more than one *hell* of a lot of brute force.

Actually I did a bit of research on this. It is true that in most cases, 
finesse is a lot better than brute force, even when running 10 times 
slower. However, once you have the weak passwords cracked, I know of no 
known password selection algorithm that has a significant advantage over 
brute force (at least with my test data).

This means that for moderately strong passwords, brute force is often 
better, because it is just faster, and easy to distribute. However, the 
probability that you crack this password remains low in all cases.

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