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Cracking MD5 Hash Passwords: A Practical Guide



Now we can start using hashcat with the rockyou wordlist to crack the MD5 hashes. The rockyou wordlist comes pre-installed with Kali. If you are not using Kali you can use another wordlist, or download it from here.




how to crack md5 hash passwords



CrackStation uses massive pre-computed lookup tables to crack password hashes.These tables store a mapping between the hash of a password, and the correctpassword for that hash. The hash values are indexed so that it is possible toquickly search the database for a given hash. If the hash is present in thedatabase, the password can be recovered in a fraction of a second. This onlyworks for "unsalted" hashes. For information on password hashing systems thatare not vulnerable to pre-computed lookup tables, see our hashing security page.


Crackstation's lookup tables were created by extracting every word from theWikipedia databases and adding with every password list we could find. We alsoapplied intelligent word mangling (brute force hybrid) to our wordlists to makethem much more effective. For MD5 and SHA1 hashes, we have a 190GB,15-billion-entry lookup table, and for other hashes, we have a 19GB1.5-billion-entry lookup table.


In this assignment we build code to reverse an MD5 hash using a brute force technique where we simply 'forward hash' all possible combinations of characters in strings. This would be similar to a situation where an e-commerce site stored hashed passwords in its database and we somehow have gotten our hands on the database contents and we want to take the hashed password and determine the actual plaintext passwords.


The simplest brute force approach generally is done by writing a series of nested loops that go through all possible combinations of characters. This is one of the reasons that password policies specify that you include uppper case, lower case, numbers, and punctuation in passwords is to makebrute force cracking more difficult. Significantly increasing the length of the password to something like 20-30 characters is a very good to make brute force cracking more difficult.


Your application will take an MD5 value like "81dc9bdb52d04dc20036dbd8313ed055" (the MD5 for the string "1234") and check all combinations of four-digit "PIN" numbers to see if any of those PINs produce the given hash.


You will present the user with a form where they can enter an MD5 string and request that you reverse-hash the string. If you can reverse hashthe string, print out the PIN: PIN: 1234If the string does not reverse hash to a four digit number simply put out a message like: PIN: Not found


You must check all four-digit combinations. You must hash the value as astring not as an integer. For example, this shows the right and wrong way to check the hash for "1234": $check = hash('md5', '1234'); // Correct - hashing a string $check = hash('md5', 1234); // Incorrect - hashing an integer


You should also print out the first 15 attempts to reverse-hash including boththe MD5 value and PIN that you were testing. You should also print outthe elapsed time for your computation as shown in the sample application.


  • In order to make the assignments more consistent, please follow these technicalguidelines:Put all of your code to do the cracking in your "index.php" so you can hand in one file. You can have other files (like in the sample solution)that you do not have to hand in.

  • Name the form field where you pass the MD5 into your application "md5"

  • Use the GET method on your form (i.e. not POST)

  • What To Hand InFor this assignment you will hand in:A screen shot of one of the MD5's from the list above/in the spec that you can successfully crack. Include the URL of your page in the screen shot so we can see your GET parameter.

  • One of the MD5's from the list above/in the spec does not crack. Using your code, figure out which MD5 in the list does *NOT* crack and show your application not finding the PIN for the MD5. Include the URL of your page in the screen shot so we can see your GET parameter.

  • Source code of your index.php



  • Here are some possible improvements:For fun, crack all of the pins at the top of this document and figureout why each person chose their PIN.

  • You can crack some but not all more complex hashed values using a site like:CrackStation.net. For fun, usethis site to crack all the above hash values.Make your application test a more complex character set like, upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and common punctuation.

  • Change the code so when it finds a match, it breaks out of all four of the nested loops. So if the PIN turned out to be 1234 it would only runthat many times. Hint: Make a logical variable that you set to truewhen you get a match and then as soon as that becomes true, break out ofthe outer loops.

  • Make your program handle longer strings - say six characters. At some point when you increase the number of characters and alphabet, itwill take longer to reverse crack the string.

  • Change the debug output to print an attempt every 0.1 second instead of only the first 15 attempts.

  • Super Advanced: Make your program handle variable length strings - perhaps looking for a string from 3-7 characters long. At some point just making more nested loops produces too much code and you should switch to a more complex but compact approach that uses a few arrays and a while loop. But this can be tricky to construct and prone to infinite loops if you are not careful.This is probably best not attempted unless you have some background inAlgorithms and Data Structures.

As your program increases its character length, or tests longer passwords, it will start to slow down. Make sure to run these on your laptop (i.e. not on a server). Many hosted PHP systems prohibit these kinds of CPU-intensive tasks on their systems.


I have heard that hashing, such as MD5, is one-way and cannot be cracked. But there are some websites that can decrypt hash, like www.md5hashing.net and some scripts like findmyhash.py. I tested some hash and it was cracked successfully.Why can it do so?


Hashes can be cracked using brute forcing. That means that you test hashing every possible input until you find one that generates the right output. To stop this a hash function used for password storage or key derivation needs to be deliberately slow (so that testing a lot of inputs take a very long time).


A site like the one you mention can also store a big list of known pairs of common inputs and outputs. Therefore they don't need to do a brute force every time someone sends them a hash to crack - they just need to look it up in the table. To stop this you use a salt (so that even a common password gets an unique hash).


Hashing is one-way, but deterministic: hash twice the same value, and you get twice the same output. So cracking a MD5 hash is about trying potential inputs (passwords) until a match is found. It works well when the input is "a password which a human user came up with" because human users are awfully unimaginative when it comes to choosing passwords.


What you can do is try to match a large number of possible inputs in the hopes of stumbling upon the input that matches your hash. There are several attacks against the MD5 algorithm that makes this significantly easier.


In the SQL injection lesson, we were able to output MD5-hashed passwords from the database. I then proceeded to use an online website to crack a couple of the hashes in order to see the plaintext password. I also mentioned we could use tools in Kali to do this instead of the website.


Since a hashcat upgrade to v6.0.0+, running hashcat within a virtualized environment is giving errors. The best approach is to not run hashcat inside of Virtual Box or VMWare, and instead, to run it on your host machine. There will be fewer issues with drivers and access to more of your hardware that way.


Technically speaking MD5 password hashes are not cracked or decrypted . They are reversed or matched using a list of possible passwords. The list of passwords is computed into a list of MD5 hashes and the one that matches the target hash corresponds with that known password.


Enter a hash below to have it compared against hashes from the rockyou.txt password list. These hashes are computed so rapidly that we test millions of potential passwords in less than a second.


Using bash on any Linux command line you can get the MD5 hash of a string simply by echoing the string to the md5sum utility. Using echo -n ensures the line break is not included in the hash generation.


In this example we use bash and the md5sum utility to generate an MD5 hash of a file. It is interesting to note that a simple text file with the "password" string matches the hash of the string password. As long as there is no line breaks in the file the hash will match. Of course getting the MD5 sum of a file is often used to confirm a files integrity - that two files from different locations or that have been downloaded match. The hash function can be performed against any file type not only simple text.


Using python from the command line we can generate the MD5 hash of a string using the hashlib library. Note the use of this library in Python 3.x requires that the string be in byte string format (encoded). [email protected]:$ python3 Python 3.8.10 (default, Sep 28 2021, 16:10:42) [GCC 9.3.0] on linux Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import hashlib >>> output = hashlib.md5(b'password') >>> print(output) >>> print(output.hexdigest()) 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99 MD5 hash of a file using WindowsSince Windows 2003 there is tool that can be used to calculate MD5 hashes of a file. The CertUtil is able to perform this function as shown below. Note that files generated under Windows will be encoded differently to those generated under Linux or OSX.


In simple terms a collision attack is one where the same MD5 hash value can be reproduced using different inputs (the whole idea is that the inputs must be identical). While not common practical, applications of collision attacks do occur. 2ff7e9595c


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