lyle_nel

8 ms·

31.
by lyle_nel 11y ago
I have found that top say 2000 ngrams from a large password list is a good starting population. That being said, it learns the structure of passwords surprisingly fast if you start of with purely random organisms. As for the moral argument,
32.
by lyle_nel 11y ago
Thanks, I did not know that. It is something to think about.
33.
by lyle_nel 11y ago
When using hashcat, it will run as fast as hashcat's dictionary mode. Since we are being cute with named pipes, hashcat thinks its reading a dictionary. There is a caching problem with hashcat though, that is why I set the segment size
34.
by lyle_nel 11y ago
The queue structure is one of my own ideas. It is possible that it has been done before, but I did not check. There does not seem to be a lot of research on this topic. That being said, it is a nice toy problem to explore genetic algorithms
35.
by lyle_nel 11y ago
Not really, there is no fitness function, there is only some implicit selection pressure. Remember, a single individual is a single password(a string). The program does not keep track of how many viable offspring a parent produces. All an o
36.
by lyle_nel 11y ago
That's correct. It is a queue
37.
by lyle_nel 11y ago
The topic assumes some knowledge of genetic algorithms as well as password hashing. You can look at the section "How it work" on my github page for some diagrams and a decently lengthy description. In simple words: Each organism i
38.
by lyle_nel 11y ago
Just to add to that. The program as it currently is rarely finds passwords that consist of more than 3 long words, which can still amount to decently long passwords. I have not tried to give it an english dictionary as a seed population. Ma
39.
by lyle_nel 11y ago
Almost yea. In a few hours it manages to find these horse related passwords. 15 strawberryhorse 15 ilovehorses1995 15 ilovehorses1994 15 ilovehorses1234 15 horselover4ever
40.
by lyle_nel 11y ago
I changed the example since I realised that it is a bit hard to understand. The example now shows how to crack a list of md5 hashes. All I did was convert the myspace list to md5 hashes. You can now try and crack the myspace list in the pro
41.
by lyle_nel 11y ago
There is no explicit function that decides which organisms are more fit than others. But you are right that there is selection pressure since all organisms have the same lifetime(they are eventually popped from front as newer ones are pushe
42.
by lyle_nel 11y ago
Yes the training set should be representative of the candidates you want to crack, also the larger the training set is, the better it seems to perform. It is also important to note that, as passwords are being cracked they become part of th
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by lyle_nel 11y ago
There is total separation between the myspace list and the rest of the program. The only thing the simulation can do is query hit or miss. Through these hits and misses it figures out what are the words inside the myspace list. The situatio
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Show HN: Cracking passwords with a simple genetic algorithm(github.com)
149 points by lyle_nel 11y ago|58 comments