Reasoning Analytically about Password-Cracking Software

Abstract

A rich literature has presented efficient techniques for estimating password strength by modeling password-cracking algorithms. Unfortunately, these previous techniques only apply to probabilistic password models, which real attackers seldom use. In this paper, we introduce techniques to reason analytically and efficiently about transformation-based password cracking in software tools like John the Ripper and Hashcat. We define two new operations, rule inversion and guess counting, with which we analyze these tools without needing to enumerate guesses. We implement these techniques and find orders-of-magnitude reductions in the time it takes to estimate password strength. We also present four applications showing how our techniques enable increased scientific rigor in optimizing these attacks' configurations. In particular, we show how our techniques can leverage revealed password data to improve orderings of transformation rules and to identify rules and words potentially missing from an attack configuration. Our work thus introduces some of the first principled mechanisms for reasoning scientifically about the types of password-guessing attacks that occur in practice.