Penetration Testing mailing list archives

Re: Password secured using???


From: "Art Cooper" <acooper () pop innerwall com>
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 14:57:05 -0600

The ONLY good way to do these is with Cain & Abel and a HUGE rainbow dictionar
(ies)

Best Regards,
Coop

Arthur B. Cooper Jr. "Coop"
Senior Network Engineer
Innerwall, Inc.
http://www.innerwall.com
acooper () innerwall com


On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 08:43:01 -0500, Phil Frederick wrote
On 4/24/06, Robert J. Kraus <rkraus () telcomtex net> wrote:
To me it does look like a hash of some sort. Now that you have the known
password and the hash you can take that information and reverse engineer
the hashed answer.

I am curious to see how they hashed it and what algorithm they used.
Once you have the hashing algorithm you can use that to unencrypt any
passwords in the file.

Hashes are one way functions.  You cannot work backward (or even
reverse engineer - what would be the point?) from a hash and 
"decrypt" password.  Even if the the hashing algorithm is MD5, SHA-
0/SHA-1
(which have been shown to have collision weaknesses), finding a 
collision is unlikely.  Reverse engineering is really not the answer
(sort of).

The most likely course would be to use a rainbow table or a 
dictionary attack.  Use the known password and generate hashes using 
the different algorithms (MD5, SHA-0, SHA-1, TIGER, etc).  When you 
find a match with the stored hash, you know the algorithm in use.  
Then all that is needed is start slamming a dictionary against the 
rest of the hashes, try some brute force variants.  It gets a little 
more difficult if it turns out they are using a salt to XOR the password
before the hash.  Sometimes you can discover the salt by tracing the
program execution in a debugger - but it's a real pain.

I would also take images of the machine's memory.  You would be
surprised how many plaintext information floats around there.  In my
work I have found a few systems that use strong hashing/encryption
algorithms vulnerable due to poor protocol implementation.

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This List Sponsored by: Cenzic

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Choice Award from eWeek. As attacks through web applications continue to rise, 
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