Password cracking

Steps required for password cracking software:

1. Identify which columns contain the username and the password (hashed or otherwise).
2. Identify the algorithm used.
3. Identify whether a salt is used.

From these there are multiple stages:

1. If no salt is used (e.g. plain MD5), consult a pre-computed lookup table.

Identifying an algorithm

• Length: 32 characters is likely to be MD5.
• Characters: 0-9a-zA-Z is likely to be MD5.

Lookup tables

• How should these be delivered? Plain text file, SQLite database, Lightning Memory-Mapped Database (LMDB), something else?
• What options does the chosen language support?
• Which options are the most efficient?

Libraries

Ultimately most libraries end up being a wrapper around OpenSSL.