Why we need strong p4ssw0rds

Back in February 2011, Rick Redman from Korelogic came to present his Supercharged Password Cracking Techniques at the Austin OWASP chapter monthly meeting.

With these techniques, he was able to crack large password database in a very short time using a tool called John The Ripper. In this article, I want to present what are these techniques and what we can do to secure our identities online.

In December 2010, the media group Gawker (Gizmodo.com, Lifehacker.com) was attacked and their 750,000-password database was stolen. The passwords were encrypted with the algorithm DES, but it did not prevent them from being cracked. More recently, the Sony's Playstation Network was also being attacked. More than 75 million passwords, emails, credit card numbers and other personal data have been compromised.

The top left shows the 250 most commonly used passwords from the Gawker database. I built this word cloud with wordle.net. On the right, it is an extract of the password dictionary used by John The Ripper. I built this with a JS library called stratus. If you are currently using one of these passwords for your bank account, you should probably change it quickly!

These decrypted real user passwords not only revealed what are the commonly used passwords but also showed that many people are using the same patterns to build their passwords. Knowing these patterns, it is possible to crack passwords in a much shorter time than using a basic brute force technique.

Here is how you can customize John The Ripper (JTR) to crack encrypted passwords. Please note that I am using an unofficial build of JTR available here. First, you need to create a file containing the passwords to crack. In our example, this file is called pwd2crack.txt and here is the file content:

user1:d0763edaa9d9bd2a9516280e9044d885
user2:a8e003b1180fd689f558657079d05f5a

The file contains the passwords for 2 users: user1 and user2. The passwords are hashed using the MD5 algorithm.

To run John The Ripper, you can use the following command:

>john --wordlist=password.lst --format=raw-MD5 pwd2crack.txt
Loaded 2 password hashes with no different salts (Raw MD5 [raw-md5 SSE2 16x4])
monkey           (user1)
guesses: 1  time: 0:00:00:00 100.00% (ETA: Mon May  2 22:42:22 2011)  c/s: 469428  trying: trinity - hallo

As you can see, JTR was able to crack user1's password almost instantly because "monkey" was in its list of passwords. But JTR was unable to crack user2's password. You can try the default command using the built-in logic to guess the passwords.

>john --format=raw-MD5 pwd2crack.txt
Loaded 2 password hashes with no different salts (Raw MD5 [raw-md5 SSE2 16x4])
Remaining 1 password hash
guesses: 0  time: 0:00:00:04 (3)  c/s: 195765  trying: 39of - 3ayo
guesses: 0  time: 0:00:00:15 (3)  c/s: 2965K  trying: beteng95 - betel197
guesses: 0  time: 0:00:00:43 (3)  c/s: 5430K  trying: swoji1x - swojsem
guesses: 0  time: 0:00:00:55 (3)  c/s: 5817K  trying: ahabh9 - ahabu2
guesses: 0  time: 0:00:01:08 (3)  c/s: 6052K  trying: luk12ay - luk11io
Session aborted

After running this command for a few minutes, my computer got really hot and JTR was still not able to crack user2's password. While JTR is running, press the space bar to print in the console the progress of the operation.

One of the common patterns for password is to add a date at the end of the password, especially the current year. You can configure JTR to use its password dictionary with "2011" at the end of each entry by adding the following to the file john.ini or john.conf.

[List.External:CustomWithYear2011]
void filter() {
 /* calculate word length */
 int length;
 length = 0;
 while (word[length]) length++;

 word[length] = '2';
 word[length+1] = '0';
 word[length+2] = '1';
 word[length+3] = '1';
 word[length+4] = 0;
}

This function, written in C, alters the password to hash before it is compared to the one in pwd2crack.txt. Then you can call JTR with this customization.

>john.exe --format=raw-MD5 --wordlist=password.lst --external=CustomWithYear2011 pwd2crack.txt
Loaded 2 password hashes with no different salts (Raw MD5 [raw-md5 SSE2 16x4])
Remaining 1 password hash
monkey2011       (user2)
guesses: 1  time: 0:00:00:00 100.00% (ETA: Mon May  2 22:06:09 2011)  c/s: 25600  trying: freedom2011 - barney2011

This time JTR was able to crack the second password: monkey2011.

You can get more details about these techniques on the Korelogic website.

Here are a few tips I would recommend:

• The passwords protecting your most valuable accounts should not be shared with other website
• Use password that are strong and easy to remember
• If available, use 2-factor authentication (eg: Paypal, Google, World of Warcraft)

If you are responsible of a website, you can:

• Raise your users awareness (password strength indicator, trainings)
• Use a strong hash algorithm to store the passwords (BlowFish)
• Integrate a second factor of authentication