Contents
What are the ways hackers perform dictionary attacks?
How do dictionary attacks work? A dictionary attack uses a preselected library of words and phrases to guess possible passwords. It operates under the assumption that users tend to pull from a basic list of passwords, such as “password,” “123abc” and “123456.”
Why is password salt effective in mitigating offline dictionary attacks?
Recap. A cryptographic salt is made up of random bits added to each password instance before its hashing. Salts create unique passwords even in the instance of two users choosing the same passwords. Salts help us mitigate hash table attacks by forcing attackers to re-compute them using the salts for each user.
How does a salt protect against a dictionary attack?
By adding a random salt, you no longer have dictionary words. Thus a password hash table based on dictionary words will not be helpful in cracking a password. Each salt value requires a different dictionary, so every database that doesn’t use a salt can be attacked with the same dictionary.
How does a pre computed dictionary attack work?
A dictionary is a structure where values are indexed by keys. In the case of a pre-computed dictionary attack, each key is a hash, and the corresponding value is a password that results in the hash. With a pre-computed dictionary in hand, an attacker can “instantly” lookup a password that will produce the necessary hash to log in.
Can a dictionary attack be used to crack a password?
If the cracking software matches the hash output from the dictionary attack to the password hash, the attacker has successfully identified the original password. A hybrid attack appends, prepends, or changes characters in words from a dictionary before hashing in order to attempt the fastest crack of complex passwords.
How is an attacker able to figure out a password?
To start, the attacker could try a dictionary attack. Using a pre-arranged listing of words, such as the entries from the English dictionary, with their computed hash, the attacker easily compares the hashes from a stolen passwords table with every hash on the list. If a match is found, the password then can be deduced.