In the spirit of DEF CON and a week of hacking, Tech Talker covers one question he gets asked all the time: How do you 'crack' a password?
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I’m going to cover one question that I get asked all the time: How do you 'crack' a password?
To answer that, I’m going to take you through the steps a hacker would use to break your password—so that you can avoid some of the pitfalls that would make you an easy target to any password cracker out there.
What's a Hash?
First, let’s talk about how passwords are stored. If a website or program is storing your password--like Google, Facebook or anywhere that you have an online account--the password is generally stored in the form of a hash. A hash is basically a secure way of storing passwords based upon math.
A hash is also a way of scrambling a password—so if you know the trick, you can easily unscramble it. It would be similar to hiding a key to your house in your front yard: if you knew where the key was, it would take you only a few seconds to find it. However, if you didn’t know where the key was it would probably take you a long time to find it.
The 2 Types of Hacker Attacks
Now, let’s break down password attacks into two different types: online and offline.
Offline attacks are where a hacker can take a password hash, copy it, and take it home with them to work on. Online attacks require the attacker trying to login to your online account to go to the specific website they are targeting.
Online attacks on secure websites are very difficult for a hacker, because these types of sites will limit the number of times an attacker can try a password. This has probably happened to you if you’ve forgotten your password and been locked out of your account. This system is actually designed to protect you from hackers who are trying billions of guesses to figure out your password.
An online attack would be like if you tried to search for someone’s hidden key in their front yard while they were home. If you looked in a few places, it probably wouldn’t look too odd; however, if you spent all day in front of the house, you’d be spotted and told to leave right away!
In the case of an online attack, a hacker would most likely do a lot of research on a particular target to see if they could find any identifying information about them, such as children’s names, birthdays, significant others, old addresses, etc. From there, an attacker could try a handful of targeted passwords that would have a higher success rate than just random guesses.
Offline attacks are much more sinister, and don’t offer this protection. Offline attacks take place when an encrypted file, such as a PDF or document, is intercepted, or when a hashed key is transferred (as is the case with WiFi.) If you copy an encrypted file or hashed password, an attacker can take this key home with them and try to crack it at their leisure.
Although this may sound awful, it’s not as bad as you may think. Password hashes are almost always 'one-way functions.' In English, this just means that you can perform a series of scrambles of your password that are next to impossible to reverse. This makes finding a password pretty darn difficult.
Essentially, a hacker has to be very very patient and try thousands, millions, billions, and sometimes even trillions of passwords before they find the right one. There are a few ways hackers go about this to increase the probability that they can find your password. These include:
Dictionary Attacks
Mask/Character Set Attacks
Bruteforce
Let's talk more about each of these.
Dictionary Attacks
Dictionary attacks are just what they sound like: you use the dictionary to find a password. Hackers basically have very large text files that include millions of generic passwords, such as password, iloveyou, 12345, admin, or 123546789. (If I just said your password, change it now!!!)
Hackers will try each of these passwords --which may sound like a lot of work, but it’s not. Hackers use really fast computers (and sometimes even video game graphics cards) in order to try zillions of passwords. As an example, while competing at DEFCON this last week, I used my graphics card to break an offline password, at a speed of 500,000 passwords a second!
Mask/Character Set Attacks
If a hacker can’t guess your password from a dictionary of known passwords, their next option will be to use some general rules to try a lot of combinations of specified characters. This means that instead of trying a list of passwords, a hacker would specify a list of characters to try.
For example, if I knew your password was just numbers, I would tell my program to only try number combinations as passwords. From here, the program would try every combination of numbers until it cracked the password. Hackers can specify a ton of other settings, like minimum and maximum length, how many times to repeat a specific character in a row, and many more. This decreases the amount of work the program would need to do.
So, let's say I had an 8 character password made up of just numbers. Using my graphics card, it would take about 200 seconds--just over 3 minutes--to crack this password. However, if the password included lowercase letters and numbers, the same 8 character password would take about 2 days to decode.
Bruteforce
If an attacker has had no luck with these two methods, they may also 'bruteforce' your password. A bruteforce tries every character combination until it gets the password. Generally, this type of attack is impractical, though--as anything over 10 characters would take millions of years to figure out!
As you can see, cracking a password isn’t as hard as you may think, in theory--you just try trillions of passwords until you get one right! However, it's important to remember that finding that one needle in the haystack is sometimes next to impossible.
Your best safety bet is to have a long password that is unique to you, and to whatever service you’re using. I’d highly recommend checking out my episodes on storing passwords and creating strong passwords for more info.
John the Ripper (JtR) is one of the hacking tools the Varonis IR Team used in the first Live Cyber Attack demo, and one of the most popular password cracking programs out there. In this blog post, we are going to dive into John the Ripper, show you how it works, and explain why it’s important.
Notes about hacking: Hacking is a pursuit of knowledge about systems, design, and humans. In this case, we are talking about software and operating systems.
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Hacking is not necessarily criminal, although it can be a tool used for bad intentions. We advocate for ethical hacking. Stay in the light side of the Force.
How Does John the Ripper Work?
JtR supports several common encryption technologies out-of-the-box for UNIX and Windows-based systems. (ed. Mac is UNIX based). JtR autodetects the encryption on the hashed data and compares it against a large plain-text file that contains popular passwords, hashing each password, and then stopping it when it finds a match. Simple.
In our amazing Live Cyber Attack demo, the Varonis IR team demonstrates how to steal a hashed password, use JtR to find the true password, and use it to log into an administrative account. That is a very common use case for JtR!
JtR also includes its own wordlists of common passwords for 20+ languages. These wordlists provide JtR with thousands of possible passwords from which it can generate the corresponding hash values to make a high-value guess of the target password. Since most people choose easy-to-remember passwords, JtR is often very effective even with its out-of-the-box wordlists of passwords.
JtR is included in the pentesting versions of Kali Linux.
What is John the Ripper Used for?
JtR is primarily a password cracker used during pentesting exercises that can help IT staff spot weak passwords and poor password policies.
Here is the list of encryption technologies found in JtR:
- UNIX crypt(3)
- Traditional DES-based
- “bigcrypt”
- BSDI extended DES-based
- FreeBSD MD5-based (linux and Cisco IOS)
- OpenBSD Blowfish-based
- Kerberos/AFS
- Windows LM (DES-based)
- DES-based tripcodes
- SHA-crypt hashes (newer versions of Fedora and Ubuntu)
- SHA-crypt and SUNMD5 hashes (Solaris)
That’s the “official” list. JtR is open-source, so if your encryption of choice isn’t on the list do some digging. Someone might have already written an extension for it.
How to Download John the Ripper
JtR is an open-source project, so you can either download and compile the source on your own, download the executable binaries, or find it as part of a penetration testing package.
The official website for John the Ripper is on Openwall. You can grab the source code and binaries there, and you can join the GitHub to contribute to the project.
JtR is available on Kali Linux as part of their password cracking metapackages.
Tutorials for Using John the Ripper
We are going to go over several of the basic commands that you need to know to start using John the Ripper. To get started all you need is a file that contains a hash value to decrypt.
If you ever need to see a list of commands in JtR, run this command:
Cracking Passwords
John the Ripper’s primary modes to crack passwords are single crack mode, wordlist mode, and incremental. The single crack mode is the fastest and best mode if you have a full password file to crack. Wordlist mode compares the hash to a known list of potential password matches. Incremental mode is the most powerful and possibly won’t complete. This is your classic brute force mode that tries every possible character combination until you have a possible result.
The easiest way to try cracking a password is to let JtR go through a series of common cracking modes. This command below tells JtR to try “simple” mode, then the default wordlists containing likely passwords, and then “incremental” mode.
You can also download different wordlists from the Internet, and you can create your own new wordlists for JtR to use with the –wordlist parameter.
If you want to specify a cracking mode use the exact parameter for the mode.
Word Mangling Rules
Mangling is a preprocessor in JtR that optimizes the wordlist to make the cracking process faster. Use the –rules parameter to set the mangling rules.
Viewing Your Output
When you want to see the list of passwords that you have cracked, use the –show parameter.
If your cracked password list is long, you can filter the list with additional parameters. You can also redirect the output using basic redirection in your shell. For example, if you want to see if you cracked any root users (UID=0) use the –users parameter.
Or if you want to show users from privileged groups use –groups.
Below is the JtR command from our Live Cyber Attack Webinar. In this scenario, our hacker used kerberoast to steal a Kerberos ticket granting ticket(TGT) containing the hash to be cracked, which was saved in a file called ticket.txt. In our case, the wordlist used is the classic rockyou password file from Kali Linux, and the command was set to report progress every 3 seconds.
If you want to see some cool pentesting and defense tactics using Varonis, check out the Live Cyber Attack Webinars! Pick any time that works for you!