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Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 06:09:56 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: john-users@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re:  rules - Q vs M and their effects on speed?

On Mon, Jun 26, 2006 at 06:18:40AM +0000, Phantom wrote:
> Was wondering if you could describe the effects of and difference between 
> Q and M in jtr rules and their effects of cracking speed?
> I think the docs are little vague on this point....

doc/RULES describes these commands as:

M	memorize the word
Q	reject the word unless it has changed

and indeed that's precisely what they do.  You can think of the command
letters as abbreviations for "Memorize" and "Query" to make it easier
for you to remember them.

> Maybe give some examples of the optimal usage of these two?

The commands are intended to be used to reject candidate passwords that
would be duplicates of those produced by another rule.

For example, the following two rules:

# Try words as they are
:
# Lowercase every word
-c lQ

might produce fewer duplicate candidate passwords than:

# Try words as they are
:
# Lowercase every word
-c l

would.  That's because some input words are already all-lowercase, so
converting them to lowercase does not change them.  The "Q" in the first
example would reject words that are unaffected by the conversion.
(Alternatively, words could have been checked for containing uppercase
letters prior to the conversion to lowercase.)

A more complicated example:

# Lowercase and reverse pure alphabetic words
!?AlMrQ

This uses the "Memorize" command to make the "Query" apply to the
"reversal" only, not to the "lowercase".  Here, it is assumed that we've
already tried "lowercased" words and now want to try "reversed" words
that are affected by the "reversal".  That is, we won't be trying
palindromes here.

"Query" doesn't have to be the last thing that we do in a rule:

# Reverse and capitalize pure alphabetic words (fred -> Derf)
-c >2!?AMrQc

Here, we assume to have already tried all words in capitalized form.  So
we want to try capitalizing reversed words only if those words are not
palindromes - hence the Memorize-reverse-Query check.

-- 
Alexander Peslyak <solar at openwall.com>
GPG key ID: B35D3598  fp: 6429 0D7E F130 C13E C929  6447 73C3 A290 B35D 3598
http://www.openwall.com - bringing security into open computing environments

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