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Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2006 00:47:02 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: john-users@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: JTR and Speed

On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 06:18:17PM +0100, Hari Sekhon wrote:
> I'm trying to crack at 5329 for FreeBSD MD5[32/32]. :-(
> 
> I've also noticed that DES is very very weak and therefore very very 
> nice to crack!

This has nothing to do with MD5 vs. DES (those are not even directly
comparable - one is a message digest function, the other is a block
cipher).

FreeBSD-style MD5-based crypt(3) hashes are much slower to calculate
than traditional DES-based crypt(3) ones because of differences in
the high-level algorithms built on top of MD5 and DES.  It is very wrong
to blame DES itself for issues that are in fact specific to the
traditional crypt(3).

To illustrate my point, here's a simple password found on password.lst
included with John 1.7 hashed in two different ways:

BSDI-DES-1M:_/7o1joyzlToXsb0IlQY
raw-MD5:8dbdda48fb8748d6746f1965824e966a

(Cracking the raw-MD5 hash with John requires the contributed patch -
or you can just use the jumbo patch.)

Now, would you draw the opposite conclusion from this?..

It is important to pick the right words.  It's "traditional DES-based
crypt(3)", not just DES, etc.

Maybe I should adjust the short hash type identifiers that John reports,
too, although that would mean that either stuff wouldn't fit on one line
or the identifiers would become cryptic (e.g., "crypt3-trad-des").

-- 
Alexander Peslyak <solar at openwall.com>
GPG key ID: B35D3598  fp: 6429 0D7E F130 C13E C929  6447 73C3 A290 B35D 3598
http://www.openwall.com - bringing security into open computing environments

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