When poorly suited algorithms are used, these cracking rigs can transform a plaintext word such as “password” into a hash like “5baa61e4c9b93f3f0682250b6cf8331b7ee68fd8” billions of times each second.įurther Reading Anatomy of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331”Another technique that makes word lists much more powerful is known as a combinator attack. These rules and lists run on clusters that specialize in parallel computing, meaning they can perform repetitive tasks like cranking out large numbers of password guesses much faster than CPUs can. Examples of real-world passwords cracked using mangling include: 'Coneyisland9/,' 'momof3g8kids,' 'Oscar+emmy2' “k1araj0hns0n,' 'Sh1a-labe0uf,' 'Apr!l221973,' 'Qbesancon321,' 'DG091101%,' 'ilovetofunot,' 'windermere2313,' 'tmdmmj17,' and 'BandGeek2014.' While these passwords may appear to be sufficiently long and complex, mangling rules make them extremely easy to guess. When a word such as 'password' appears in a word list, for instance, the mangling rules transform it into variations like 'Password' or even though they never appear directly in the word list.

Popular password-cracking applications like Hashcat and John the Ripper then apply ' mangling rules' to these lists to enable variations on the fly. These guesses are used in offline attacks made possible when a database of password hashes leaks as a result of a security breach.įurther Reading Why passwords have never been weaker-and crackers have never been stronger Conventional password guessing uses lists of words numbering in the billions taken from previous breaches. These GANs generate password guesses after autonomously learning the distribution of passwords by processing the spoils of previous real-world breaches. It uses machine learning algorithms running on a neural network in place of conventional methods devised by humans.

PassGAN is a shortened combination of the words 'Password' and 'generative adversarial networks.' PassGAN is an approach that debuted in 2017. And like so many of the non-AI password checkers Ars has criticized in the past-e.g., here, here, and here-the researchers behind PassGAN draw password advice from their experiment that undermines real security. In short, anything PassGAN can do, these more tried and true tools do as well or better.

PassGAN, as the tool is dubbed, performs no better than more conventional cracking methods. Further Reading How the “Get Safe Online” password checker fails users-badlyAs with so many things involving AI, the claims are served with a generous portion of smoke and mirrors.

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