What is Password Cracking?

Password cracking is the process of attempting to gain Unauthorized access to restricted systems using common passwords or algorithms that guess passwords. In other words, it’s an art of obtaining the correct password that gives access to a system protected by an authentication method.

Password cracking employs a number of techniques to achieve its goals. The cracking process can involve either comparing stored passwords against word list or use algorithms to generate passwords that match

What is password strength?

Password strength is the measure of a password’s efficiency to resist password cracking attacks. The strength of a password is determined by;

  • Length: the number of characters the password contains.
  • Complexity: does it use a combination of letters, numbers, and symbol?
  • Unpredictability: is it something that can be guessed easily by an attacker?

Let’s now look at a practical example. We will use three passwords namely

1.  password

2.  password1

3.  #password1$

 For this example, we will use the password strength indicator of Cpanel when creating passwords. The images below show the password strengths of each of the above-listed passwords.

The higher the strength number, better the password.

Let’s suppose that we have to store our above passwords using md5 encryption. We will use an online md5convertor to convert our passwords into md5 hashes.

The table below shows the password hashes    

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Hello,

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Rk Thakur

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