Performance evaluation of Cuckoo filters as an enhancement tool for password cracking

Abstract Cyberthreats continue their expansion, becoming more and more complex and varied. However, credentials and passwords are still a critical point in security. Password cracking can be a powerful tool to fight against cyber criminals if used by cybersecurity professionals and red teams, for instance, to evaluate compliance with security policies or in forensic investigations. For particular systems, one crucial step in the password-cracking process is comparison or matchmaking between password-guess hashes and real hashes. We hypothesize that using newer data structures such as Cuckoo filters could optimize this process. Experimental results show that, with a proper configuration, this data structure is two orders of magnitude more efficient in terms of size/usage compared to other data structures while keeping a comparable performance in terms of time.