Show HN: I Dedicated 4 Years to Mastering Offline Password Cracking
I am Bojta Lepenye, and first of all, I want to thank the core developers of Hashcat. In my experience, it is quite literally the most capable tool available for offline password cracking across a wide range of use cases.
I have spent the last 4 years (from age 14 to 18) extensively working with Hashcat and the tools surrounding it, and I have documented what I have learned throughout that time (since January 18, 2022) in my first book. During that period, I also had to continuously update and rewrite major sections as the field evolved. One example was the introduction of GPU support for Argon2 and other memory-hard password hashing algorithms, which significantly changed some cracking workflows.
My passion for this book, or its “quick starter,” if you will, came from an ethically conducted penetration test I performed with full authorization at my school. This is something I am both hesitant and quite proud to acknowledge.
At the beginning, I simply wrote down everything I had learned from YouTube videos and online blogs. However, not long after starting my project, I realized I practically knew nothing about password security, and that small 10 to 15 pages I had written would never be enough if someone was looking for a professional guide to cracking passwords.
The other main driving force behind the book was the fact that while researching online, browsing forums, reading academic papers and white papers, watching videos, exploring blogs, inspecting presentations, and examining infographics, I did not find a single source that comprehensively covers and explains everything one needs to understand about offline password cracking. Literally. Not one.
Therefore, I continued my research and learned about password hashing algorithms, the security properties of hash functions, advanced hash cracking techniques, password analysis, attack optimization, and much, much more.
From the very beginning, I wanted to share this knowledge with the community because having access to a resource like this would have helped me tremendously when I first started learning password cracking.
I sincerely hope this work will be useful to both beginners and experienced professionals alike, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback.
I have also put together a little video to give you a little sneak peek into it. It is on Google Drive. It is the official domain, and you do not need to download anything. Here it is: https://drive.google.com/file/d/13LeysSZO8Mx-LGKt8UQjUGBKOYH...
If you are interested, the book is now publicly available on Amazon, and can be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited subscription: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX36XRCD