Comparison of the size of password search space when treating the password as a sequence of characters or words, or as words generated by grammatical structure. Rao,et al. When it comes to long phrases used to defeat recent advances in password cracking, bigger isn’t necessarily better, particularly when the phrases adhere to grammatical rules. A team of Ph.D. and grad students at Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed an algorithm that targets passcodes with a minimum number of 16 characters and built it into the freely available John the Ripper cracking program. The result: it was much more efficient at cracking passphrases such as “abiggerbetter password” or “thecommunistfairy” because they followed commonly used grammatical rules—in this case, ordering parts of speech in the sequence “determiner, adjective, noun.” When tested against 1,434 passwords containing 16 or more characters, the grammar-aware cracker surpassed other state-of-the-art password crackers when the passcodes had grammatical structures, with 10 percent of the dataset cracked exclusively by the team’s algorithm. The approach is significant because it comes as security experts are revising password policies to combat the growing sophistication of modern cracking techniques which make the average password weaker than ever before . A key strategy in making passwords more resilient is to use phrases that result in longer passcodes. Still, passphrases must remain memorable to the end user, so people often pick phrases or sentences. It turns out that grammatical structures dramatically narrow the possible combinations and sequences of words crackers must guess. One surprising outcome of the research is that the passphrase “Th3r3 can only b3 #1!” (with spaces removed) is one order of magnitude weaker than “Hammered asinine requirements” even though it contains more words. Better still is “My passw0rd is $uper str0ng!” because it requires significantly more tries to correctly guess. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Grammar badness makes cracking harder the long password
chicksdaddy writes “A presentation at the Passwords^12 Conference in Oslo, Norway (slides), has moved the goalposts on password cracking yet again. Speaking on Monday, researcher Jeremi Gosney (a.k.a epixoip) demonstrated a rig that leveraged the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) framework and a technology known as Virtual Open Cluster (VCL) to run the HashCat password cracking program across a cluster of five, 4U servers equipped with 25 AMD Radeon GPUs communicating at 10 Gbps and 20 Gbps over Infiniband switched fabric. Gosney’s system elevates password cracking to the next level, and effectively renders even the strongest passwords protected with weaker encryption algorithms, like Microsoft’s LM and NTLM, obsolete. In a test, the researcher’s system was able to generate 348 billion NTLM password hash checks per second. That renders even the most secure password vulnerable to compute-intensive brute force and wordlist (or dictionary) attacks. A 14 character Windows XP password hashed using LM for example, would fall in just six minutes, said Per Thorsheim, organizer of the Passwords^12 Conference. For some context: In June, Poul-Henning Kamp, creator of the md5crypt() function used by FreeBSD and other, Linux-based operating systems, was forced to acknowledge that the hashing function is no longer suitable for production use — a victim of GPU-powered systems that could perform ‘close to 1 million checks per second on COTS (commercial off the shelf) GPU hardware,’ he wrote. Gosney’s cluster cranks out more than 77 million brute force attempts per second against MD5crypt.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
mask.of.sanity writes “Hardcoded usernames and passwords have been discovered in a recent line of Telstra broadband routers that allow attackers access to customer networks. The flaws meant customer unique passwords could be bypassed to access the device administrative console and LAN.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
