A password, sometimes called a passcode, is secret data, typically a string of characters, usually used to confirm a user's identity. Traditionally, passwords were expected to be memorized, but the large number of password-protected services that a typical individual accesses can make memorization of unique passwords for each service impractical. Using the terminology of the NIST Digital Identity Guidelines, the secret is held by a party called the claimant while the party verifying the identity of the claimant is called the verifier. When the claimant successfully demonstrates knowledge of the password to the verifier through an established authentication protocol, the verifier is able to infer the claimant's identity.
In cryptography, a brute-force attack consists of an attacker submitting many passwords or passphrases with the hope of eventually guessing correctly. The attacker systematically checks all possible passwords and passphrases until the correct one is found. Alternatively, the attacker can attempt to guess the key which is typically created from the password using a key derivation function. This is known as an exhaustive key search.
In cryptanalysis and computer security, a dictionary attack is an attack using a restricted subset of a keyspace to defeat a cipher or authentication mechanism by trying to determine its decryption key or passphrase, sometimes trying thousands or millions of likely possibilities often obtained from lists of past security breaches.
L0pht Heavy Industries was a hacker collective active between 1992 and 2000 and located in the Boston, Massachusetts area. The L0pht was one of the first viable hackerspaces in the US, and a pioneer of responsible disclosure. The group famously testified in front of Congress in 1998 on the topic of ‘Weak Computer Security in Government’.
ElcomSoft is a privately owned software company headquartered in Moscow, Russia. Since its establishment in 1990, the company has been working on computer security programs, with the main focus on password and system recovery software.
In cryptanalysis and computer security, password cracking is the process of recovering passwords from data that has been stored in or transmitted by a computer system in scrambled form. A common approach is to repeatedly try guesses for the password and to check them against an available cryptographic hash of the password. Another type of approach is password spraying, which is often automated and occurs slowly over time in order to remain undetected, using a list of common passwords.
L0phtCrack is a password auditing and recovery application originally produced by Mudge from L0pht Heavy Industries. It is used to test password strength and sometimes to recover lost Microsoft Windows passwords, by using dictionary, brute-force, hybrid attacks, and rainbow tables.
In cryptography, a salt is random data fed as an additional input to a one-way function that hashes data, a password or passphrase. Salting helps defend against attacks that use precomputed tables, by vastly growing the size of table needed for a successful attack. It also helps protect passwords that occur multiple times in a database, as a new salt is used for each password instance. Additionally, salting does not place any burden on users.
In cryptography, a preimage attack on cryptographic hash functions tries to find a message that has a specific hash value. A cryptographic hash function should resist attacks on its preimage.
LAN Manager is a discontinued network operating system (NOS) available from multiple vendors and developed by Microsoft in cooperation with 3Com Corporation. It was designed to succeed 3Com's 3+Share network server software which ran atop a heavily modified version of MS-DOS.
In cryptography, PBKDF1 and PBKDF2 are key derivation functions with a sliding computational cost, used to reduce vulnerability to brute-force attacks.
A rainbow table is a precomputed table for caching the outputs of a cryptographic hash function, usually for cracking password hashes. Passwords are typically stored not in plain text form, but as hash values. If such a database of hashed passwords falls into the hands of an attacker, they can use a precomputed rainbow table to recover the plaintext passwords. A common defense against this attack is to compute the hashes using a key derivation function that adds a "salt" to each password before hashing it, with different passwords receiving different salts, which are stored in plain text along with the hash.
Ophcrack is a free open-source program that cracks Windows log-in passwords by using LM hashes through rainbow tables. The program includes the ability to import the hashes from a variety of formats, including dumping directly from the SAM files of Windows, and can be ran via the command line or using the program’s GUI. On most computers, ophcrack can crack most passwords within a few minutes.
In a Windows network, NT LAN Manager (NTLM) is a suite of Microsoft security protocols intended to provide authentication, integrity, and confidentiality to users. NTLM is the successor to the authentication protocol in Microsoft LAN Manager (LANMAN), an older Microsoft product. The NTLM protocol suite is implemented in a Security Support Provider, which combines the LAN Manager authentication protocol, NTLMv1, NTLMv2 and NTLM2 Session protocols in a single package. Whether these protocols are used or can be used on a system which is governed by Group Policy settings, for which different versions of Windows have different default settings.
Cain and Abel was a password recovery tool for Microsoft Windows. It could recover many kinds of passwords using methods such as network packet sniffing, cracking various password hashes by using methods such as dictionary attacks, brute force and cryptanalysis attacks. Cryptanalysis attacks were done via rainbow tables which could be generated with the winrtgen.exe program provided with Cain and Abel. Cain and Abel was maintained by Massimiliano Montoro and Sean Babcock.
Password strength is a measure of the effectiveness of a password against guessing or brute-force attacks. In its usual form, it estimates how many trials an attacker who does not have direct access to the password would need, on average, to guess it correctly. The strength of a password is a function of length, complexity, and unpredictability.
Jira is a proprietary product developed by Atlassian that allows bug tracking, issue tracking and agile project management. Jira is used by a large number of clients and users globally for project, time, requirements, task, bug, change, code, test, release, sprint management.
Distributed Free Rainbow Tables was a volunteer computing project for making rainbow tables for password cracking. By using the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software platform, DistrRTgen was able to generate rainbow tables that are able to crack long passwords. DistrRtgen was used to generate LM, NTLM, MD5 and MYSQLSHA1 rainbow tables.
Microsoft Office password protection is a security feature that allows Microsoft Office documents to be protected with a user-provided password.
In cryptography, a pepper is a secret added to an input such as a password during hashing with a cryptographic hash function. This value differs from a salt in that it is not stored alongside a password hash, but rather the pepper is kept separate in some other medium, such as a Hardware Security Module. Note that the National Institute of Standards and Technology refers to this value as a secret key rather than a pepper. A pepper is similar in concept to a salt or an encryption key. It is like a salt in that it is a randomized value that is added to a password hash, and it is similar to an encryption key in that it should be kept secret.
