RE: cracking cisco passwords

["woody weaver" <woody () callisma com>]

On Monday, October 15, 2001 8:31 AM, Joshua Wright
[mailto:Joshua.Wright () jwu edu] wrote:

> Brute force with a dictionary attack would be your best option.  The
> type 5 password is based on the MD5 hash algorithm.  You could create
> a perl program with a CPAN module to calculate the hashes.

One could.  However, I think "John the Ripper" is a better approach.

Its available at the usual places, and provides an effective brute force
engine.  Because the Cisco approach is based upon the BSD code, you can use
the BSD password format -- feed john a file like

jason:$1$6Je2$MurE4FTzoZjQShRW4Ui9H0::::::::

But realize this is a hard task.  I get around 1400 crypts per second on
this laptop -- so a conventional dictionary falls pretty quickly.  But if
the site has a sound password creation policy, you are not going to succeed
with a brute force approach without some serious parallelization.

--woody


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