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10 Most Popular Password Cracking Tools [Updated 2020]

Passwords are the most commonly used method for user authentication. Passwords are so popular because the logic behind them makes sense to people and they’re relatively easy for developers to implement.

However, passwords can also introduce security vulnerabilities. Password crackers are designed to take credential data stolen in a data breach or other hack and extract passwords from it.

What is password cracking?

A well-designed password-based authentication system doesn’t store a user’s actual password. This would make it far too easy for a hacker or a malicious insider to gain access to all of the user accounts on the system.

Instead, authentication systems store a password hash, which is the result of sending the password — and a random value called a salt — through a hash function. Hash functions are designed to be one-way, meaning that it is very difficult to determine the input that produces a given output. Since hash functions are also deterministic (meaning that the same input produces the same output), comparing two password hashes (the stored one and the hash of the password provided by a user) is almost as good as comparing the real passwords.

Password cracking refers to the process of extracting passwords from the associated password hash. This can be accomplished in a few different ways:

  • Dictionary attack: Most people use weak and common passwords. Taking a list of words and adding a few permutations — like substituting $ for s — enables a password cracker to learn a lot of passwords very quickly.
  • Brute-force guessing attack: There are only so many potential passwords of a given length. While slow, a brute-force attack (trying all possible password combinations) guarantees that an attacker will crack the password eventually.
  • Hybrid attack: A hybrid attack mixes these two techniques. It starts by checking to see (Read more...)

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Infosec Resources authored by Howard Poston. Read the original post at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/infosecResources/~3/I5FUXsVyBps/