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Date: Mon, 14 May 2012 23:28:43 +0400
From: Aleksey Cherepanov <aleksey.4erepanov@...il.com>
To: john-users@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: using all available hardware

On Sun, Apr 15, 2012 at 10:41:41PM +0200, Frank Dittrich wrote:
> On 04/13/2012 04:39 PM, Aleksey Cherepanov wrote:
> > With hardware the biggest problem was that a lot of machines was not managed
> > about at all. We have much more cpu power than human resources. So the system
> > should manage machines while humans manage the system.
> 
> Right. This was indeed a big problem. I like your picture of the system
> which is managed by humans is managing the machines available.
> 
> Probably it is easy to address this problem automatically, as long as
> you have access to all the available resources (machines).
> It might get a little more complicated if you manage only a part of the
> available resources for yourself, other users managing their own machines.
> In this case, you could provide information what attacks to try next,
> keep control about who is trying which task, reschedule a task if the
> results of that task don't get returned to you after a certain time, and
> so on.
> Much of this could be done automatically.

To make system more simple and to provide support for users that do
not want to provide full access I proposed approach of a wrapper that
only reports attacks to the server leaving all management for humans
themselves. Also such wrapper will have ability to choose attack
easily by name/tag/label/uuid/whatever for convenience and to make it
obvious how to connect attack with its description on the server.

But if user does not pick attacks than his machine is idle so there
should be an option for auto-picking of attacks. It probably should be
disabled by default. Also there could be an option for auto-stop of
attack on some conditions (for instance incremental mode became less
effective than other probable attacks).

Wrapper may prevent users from picking attacks that other user do at
the same moment. But there should be an option to bypass this check.
In any case there will be a problem if one user with slow cpu picks
too many attacks: he could not complete these attacks but prevents (or
making it harder for) others from doing this attack. So there should
be checks and advices/warning to not taking too much attacks. They
may be tricky.

Regards,
Aleksey Cherepanov

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