[Klug-general] password testing/cracking

[james morris]

(sorry for previous attempt, forgot list doesn't allow attachments)

read an article about password cracking this morning:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/how-i-became-a-password-cracker/3/

and being curious decided to try my own passwords. it only seemed to
crack the first word of two (nor the two digit number at end) in my
weakest password.

then i was curious about long passwords made entirely of words such as:

longpassworddifficulttocrack

my tests don't crack that, nor even crackmenow or hardtocrack.

i'm using the rockyou.txt word list, and only encoding the passwords
as MD5 so expected better results than this.

here's a bash script to automate password testing to some degree:
https://github.com/jwm-art-net/password_tester

it starts with a file of unencoded passwords one per line, runs md5sum
on them, the tries to crack the md5s.

any tips for making the cracking effort more robust appreciated!
cheers,
james