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Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2012 23:14:29 +0400
From: Aleksey Cherepanov <aleksey.4erepanov@...il.com>
To: john-users@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: automation equipped working place of hash cracker,
 proposal

On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 08:08:49PM +0200, magnum wrote:
> On 04/13/2012 04:39 PM, Aleksey Cherepanov wrote:
> > It is common to rebuild chr files to improve incremental mode having some
> > passwords cracked.
> 
> This is common and often very rewarding. What we should not forget
> though, is that this will emphasize the errors we made in the first
> case. Suppose we crack 30% of the passwords but for some reason we
> almost always miss character 'z' (in real life it may be a handful or
> more of 8-bit or UTF-8 characters) which (very) theoretically could be
> present in 50% of the total. After rebuilding chr-files we are
> amplifying this error and will try even fewer (perhaps none) candidates
> containing character 'z'. And so on.

It is a bit like attack against pattern: for certain attack we reduce
candidates set to crack part faster at the price that this attack cracks only
part.

During contest we wrote rules to make candidates for pattern being most
probable. But we could try incremental mode: find pattern, build chr only
for these passwords, do incremental mode.

It is not as close as well written rules but is easy to be done if you know
regexps (or even without it but being patient enough to select pattern by
hands, manually) but do not know rules (and do not want to write specific
generator as a separate program).

On the other hand if we crack only small part of pattern then we could
underestimate it and write rules that describe only a part of real pattern.
So some generalization could be helpful but this needs statistics I think.
Could we estimate probability of not yet cracked hash to be from password that
is from certain pattern?

For instance, we found a lot of passwords of form 'llld' (where l is for
letter and d is for digit) and some passwords of form 'lllddd' and we know
that we cracked too few passwords of length 6 so we could assume that there
are more passwords of form 'lllddd'. Right?

Regards,
Aleksey Cherepanov

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