FC: Cracking Microsoft Windows passwords in five seconds

From: Declan McCullagh (declanat_private)
Date: Tue Jul 22 2003 - 21:19:48 PDT

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    From: Monty Solomon <montyat_private>
    Subject: Cracking windows passwords in 5 seconds
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    http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/330004
    
    
    Date: 22 Jul 2003 20:37:19 -0000
    From: <bugtraqat_private>
    Subject: Cracking windows passwords in 5 seconds
    
    As opposed to unix, windows password hashes can be calculated in advance
    because no salt or other random information si involved. This makes so
    called time-memory trade-off attacks possible. This vulnerability is not
    new but we think that we have the first tool to exploit this.
    
    At LASEC (lasecwww.epfl.ch) we have developed an advanced time-memory
    trade-off method. It is based on original work which was done in 1980 but
    has never been applied to windows passwords. It works by calculating all
    possible hashes in advance and storing some of them in an organized
    table. The more information you keep in the table, the faster the
    cracking will be.
    
    We have implemented an online demo of this method which cracks
    alphanumerical passwords in 5 seconds average (see
    http://lasecpc13.epfl.ch/ntcrack). With the help of 0.95GB of data we can
    find the password after an average of 4 million hash operation. A brute
    force cracker would need to calculate an average of 50% of all hashes,
    which amounts to about 40 billion hases for alphanumerical passwords
    (lanman hash).
    
    More info about the method can be found at in a paper at
    http://lasecwww.epfl.ch/php_code/publications/search.php?ref=Oech03.
    
       Philippe Oechslin
    
    
    
    
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