Password cracking process involves recovering a password from storage locations or from data, transmitted by a computer system on network. Password cracking term refers to group of techniques used to get password from a data system.
Purpose and reason of password cracking includes gaining an unauthorized access to a computer system or it can be recovery of forgotten password. There might be another reason of using password cracking technique that is for testing password strength so hacker could not hack into system.
Password cracking is normally performed thought repetitive process in which computer applies different combinations of password till the exact match.
Brute Force Password Cracking:
Term brute force password cracking may also be referred as brute force attack. Brute force password cracking is respective process of guessing password, in this process software or tool creates a large number of password combinations. Basically it’s a trail-and-error technique used by software to obtain password information from system.
A brute force attack are normally used by hackers when there is no chance of taking advantage of encrypted system weakness or by security analysis experts to test an organization’s network security .This method of password cracking is very fast for short length passwords but for long length passwords dictionary attack technique is normally used.
Time taken by brute force password cracking software to crack password is normally depend upon speed of system and internet connection.
GPU Password Cracking:
GPU is graphics processing unit, sometimes also called visual processing unit. Before talking about GPU password cracking we must have some understanding about hashes . When user enter password the password information stored in form of computer hashes using the one-way hashing algorithm.
In this password cracking technique using GPU software take a password guess and look through hashing algorithm and compare it or match it with the existing hashes till the exact match.
GPU can perform mathematical functions in parallel as GPU have hundreds of core that gives massive advantage in cracking password. GPU is much faster than CPU so that’s the reason of using GPU instead of CPU.
CUDA Password Cracking:
CUDA Compute Unified Device Architecture is a model for programming and a platform that perform computations in parallel, created by NVIDIA for graphic processing.
CUDA Password cracking includes cracking passwords using Graphics card which have GPU chip, GPU can perform mathematical functions in parallel so the speed of cracking password is faster than CPU.GPU have many 32bit chips on it that perform this operation very quickly.
We can easily access CUDA through libraries, directives and with the help of different programming languages that includes C, C++ and FORTRAN.
Password Cracking Tools
Given below is the list of Top10 Password cracking tools.
1. Cain and Abel : Top password cracking tool for Windows
Cain & Abel is one of the top cracking tool for password cracking and password recovery for Windows OS.
Cain & Abel can use techniques of Dictionary Attack, Brute-Force and Cryptanalysis attacks to crack encrypted passwords. So it only uses the weakness of system to crack password. GUI Interface of software is very simple and easy to use. But have availability limitation, tool only available for window based systems .Cain & Abel tool have many good features some of the features of tool are discussed below:
Features of Cain & Abel:
Used for WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) cracking
Have ability to record conversation over IP
Cab be used as Network Password Sniffer
Ability to resolve addresses IP to MAC.
Can crack verity of hashes including LM and NT hashes, IOS and PIX hashes, RADIUS hashes, RDP passwords, and lots more than that.
2. John the Ripper : Multi-platform, Powerful, Flexible password cracking tool
John the Ripper is a free multi or cross platform password cracking software. Its called multi platform as it combines different password cracking features into one package.
It’s primarily used to crack weak UNIX passwords but also available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. We can run this software against different password encryptions including many password hashes normally found in different UNIX versions. These hashes are DES, LM hash of Windows NT/2000/XP/2003, MD5, and AFS.
3. Aircrack : Fast and effective WEP/WPA cracking tool
Aircrack is a combination different tools used for Wifi, WEP and WPA passwords cracking. With the help of these tools you can crack WEP/WPA passwords easily and effectively
Brute force, FMS attack, and dictionary attacks techniques can be used to crack WEP/WPA passwords. Basically it collects and analyzes encrypted packets then using its different tool crack password out of the packets. Although aircrack is available for Windows but there are different issues with this software if we use this in Windows environment, so it’s best when we use it in Linux environment.
THC Hydra is a supper fast network password cracking tool. It uses network to crack remote systems passwords.
It can be used to crack passwords of different protocols including HTTPS, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, Cisco, CVS, SQL, SMTP etc. It will give you option that you may supply a dictionary file that contains list of possible passwords. It’s best when we use it in Linux environment.