Penetration Testing mailing list archives

Re: Bruteforce HTTP Basic authentification


From: Chris Kuethe <chris.kuethe () gmail com>
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2005 12:16:02 -0600

On 8/19/05, someone asked me:
Where could I find a frequency analyzer? Is that something you custom
wrote?

It's another little custom bit of perl. again, this is dead easy in a
couple of screens of perl. roughly like this

foreach $word (<>) {
    $n = 0;
    foreach $c (split(//, $word)){
        $freq{$n}->{$chars[0]}++;
        $n++;
    }
}

and then print the resulting hash through whatever method you choose
(use perl's built-in sort, or offload it to /usr/bin/sort...)

-----Original Message-----

From: Chris Kuethe [mailto:chris.kuethe () gmail com]
Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2005 4:06 PM
To: Serg Belokamen; Pen Test
Subject: Re: Bruteforce HTTP Basic authentification

By optimized alphabet, I mean sort the letters to be tried by order of
frequency in your probably target language. You could try AAAAAAAA,
AAAAAAAB, AAAAAAAC, ... but there's a reason why they give you "RSTLNE"
for free on Wheel of Fortune.

The last big brute force I did, I took the standard unix dictionaries,
plus the text of a bunch of ebooks I had on my laptop and came up with
frequency distributions for the first through fourth letters of the
average english word. As I was targetting a system where most of the
users were native english-speakers, I figured this was a safe assumption
to make. It took some minutes for my frequency counter to run, but when
I was finished, I had a set of alphabets that made it a lot more
effective to search for dictionary words, their leetspeak variants, and
finally alphanumeric keyboard smashing...

CK

On 8/17/05, Serg Belokamen <serg.belokamen () gmail com> wrote:
What do you "optimised alphabet" ... any URL's etc?

   Cheers,
      Serg

On 18/08/05, Chris Kuethe <chris.kuethe () gmail com> wrote:
On 8/17/05, nik <nik () adminzone ru> wrote:
Hello list!
I'm doing little pen-test of a web-application for a small
company.
This application uses HTTP Basic autintification. So the question
is:
does any one know some tools (such as brutus) for brutforce
usernames and passwors for this type of authentification. These
tools must run under Linux or FreeBSD.

The LWP perl module will do quite nicely. Combine that with an
optimized alphabet or 4, and you can have a very effective brute
forcer in a couple of screenfuls of code. Optimizing your alphabet
can be very effective, taking the time to crack a password down from

hours to minutes or even seconds if you have a good idea about the
letter distribution. ;)

CK


-- 
GDB has a 'break' feature; why doesn't it have 'fix' too?

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