Towards Fully Automated Infinitely Scalable and Maximally Effective Password Cracking of Encrypted Documents

FITcrack, hashcat, distributed password cracking

The lecture outlines password-cracking use-cases, employed formats, current GPU/FPGA performance limits and existing (non-)commercial cracking tools. Moreover, we will introduce our hypervisor for distributed password cracking that helps investigators to utilize the potential of their infrastructure. We will show how to: a) automatically extract hashes from encrypted documents; b) prepare and evaluate password key space (e.g., generate passwords using Markov chains / rule-based grammars and handling of passwords containing national characters); c) orchestrate various cracking strategies (e.g., a combination of dictionaries). Last but not least, we will speak about our experience when developing our own GPU-based hardware cracking platform competitive with industry standards from well-known vendors.