ZAYED UNIVERSITY

MSIT
CIT-508-1-MASTERS
2010

Password Cracking
[Password Cracking Techniques]

Ali Alkaf
Talal Al Ismail

10/2/2011
Project Idea

Passwords are used everywhere today, and in different things; when you buy
online you need to put your credit card password, if you want to login to your home
wireless network you need to put a username and password, you want to login to your
email you need a password, from this we conclude that most of people use password as
the first line of defense in different places. However, our goal is to explain password
cracking by testing and learning different techniques used to make password cracking
more difficult and what people should do to keep there passwords save. However, with
the huge development in technology sector password cracking increased and also the
methods of passwords encryption. This project will use different tools to crack
passwords and understand different ways to do it and protect people from being victims
of password cracking.

Project Scope
In this project we will use two different tools from back track John the Ripper,
and other tools for cracking zip and RAR archives, this tools are the most common tools
for password cracking John the Ripper is one of the most popular password
testing/breaking programs as it combines a number of password crackers into one
package, auto detects password hash types, and includes a customizable cracker. It can
be run against various encrypted password formats including several crypt password
hash types most commonly found on various UNIX flavors (based on DES, MD5, or
Blowfish), Kerberos AFS, and Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 LM hash. Additional modules
have extended its ability to include MD4-based password hashes and passwords stored
in LDAP, MySQL and others. Moreover, there are a lot of different tools for cracking
password in Back-Track we will chose one of them and learn about it then test it.
However, the challenges we think that we will face are the time to learn the tools and
most of these tools websites are blocked so we need to look in different resources for
tutorials.
Methodology
First, we will make research about the tools and how it works also we will look
for some online tutorials, after we get the basics we will download them and install
them in our machines. Moreover, we will experiment with tool see how it work the
advantage and disadvantages of the tool, also the benefits we gain form using this type
of tool in understanding the important of securing passwords.

The project will move throw different phases like:

 Making research about the tools and download them

 Install the tools and start experimenting with them
 Testing the tools
 Report Findings