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A dictionary attack is based on trying all the strings in a pre-arranged listing. Such attacks originally used words found in a dictionary (hence the phrase dictionary attack); [2] however, now there are much larger lists available on the open Internet containing hundreds of millions of passwords recovered from past data breaches. [3]
More common methods of password cracking, such as dictionary attacks, pattern checking, and variations of common words, aim to optimize the number of guesses and are usually attempted before brute-force attacks. Higher password bit strength exponentially increases the number of candidate passwords that must be checked, on average, to recover ...
A brute-force attack is a cryptanalytic attack that can, in theory, be used to attempt to decrypt any encrypted data (except for data encrypted in an information-theoretically secure manner). [1] Such an attack might be used when it is not possible to take advantage of other weaknesses in an encryption system (if any exist) that would make the ...
Though brute-force attacks (e.g. dictionary attacks) may be used to try to invert a hash function, they can become infeasible when the set of possible passwords is large enough. An alternative to brute-force is to use precomputed hash chain tables. Rainbow tables are a special kind of such table that overcome certain technical difficulties.
One of the modes John can use is the dictionary attack. [6] It takes text string samples (usually from a file, called a wordlist, containing words found in a dictionary or real passwords cracked before), encrypting it in the same format as the password being examined (including both the encryption algorithm and key), and comparing the output to the encrypted string.
This compels brute-force attackers to expend the same effort for each attempt. If this added effort compares to a brute-force key search of all keys with a certain key length, then the input key may be described as stretched by that same length. [1] Key stretching leaves an attacker with two options:
The difficulty of a brute force attack is increased with the number of iterations. A practical limit on the iteration count is the unwillingness of users to tolerate a perceptible delay in logging into a computer or seeing a decrypted message. The use of salt prevents the attackers from precomputing a dictionary of derived keys. [10]
Adding a number and/or special character to a password might thwart some simple dictionary attacks. However, common words should still be avoided to the simplicity of automated brute force testing of well known munged variations of the words. For example, the password "Butterfly" could be munged in the following ways: