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Optimisation of John the Ripper in a Clustered Linux Environment Edith Cowan University Research Online Theses : Honours Theses 2004 Optimisation of John the Ripper in a clustered Linux environment Christian Frichot Edith Cowan University Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses_hons Part of the Information Security Commons Recommended Citation Frichot, C. (2004). Optimisation of John the Ripper in a clustered Linux environment. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses_hons/145 This Thesis is posted at Research Online. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses_hons/145 Edith Cowan University Copyright Warning You may print or download ONE copy of this document for the purpose of your own research or study. The University does not authorize you to copy, communicate or otherwise make available electronically to any other person any copyright material contained on this site. You are reminded of the following: Copyright owners are entitled to take legal action against persons who infringe their copyright. A reproduction of material that is protected by copyright may be a copyright infringement. Where the reproduction of such material is done without attribution of authorship, with false attribution of authorship or the authorship is treated in a derogatory manner, this may be a breach of the author’s moral rights contained in Part IX of the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). Courts have the power to impose a wide range of civil and criminal sanctions for infringement of copyright, infringement of moral rights and other offences under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). Higher penalties may apply, and higher damages may be awarded, for offences and infringements involving the conversion of material into digital or electronic form. USE OF THESIS The Use of Thesis statement is not included in this version of the thesis. E:DtTHCOWAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Optimisation of John the Ripper in a Clustered Linux Environment By Christian Frichot A Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Science Honours ( Computer Science) School of Computing and Information Science Faculty of Computing, Health and Science Edith Cowan University J Optimising John the Ripper fora Clustered Environment Christian Frichot ABSTRACT To aid system administrators in enforcing strict password policies, the use of password cracking tools such as Cisilia (C.I.S.l.ar, 2003) and John the Ripper (Solar Designer, 2002), have been employed as software utilities to look for "weak" passwords. John the Ripper (JtR) attempts to crack the passwords by using a dictionary, brute-force or "other" mode of attack. The computational intensity of cracking passwords has led to the utilisation of parallel-processing environments to increase the speed of the password-cracking task. Parallel-processing environments can consist of either single systems with multiple processors, or a collection of separate computers working together as a single, logical computer system; both of these configurationsallow operations to run concurrently. This study aims to optimise and compare the execution of JtR on a pair of Beowulf clusters, which are a collection of computers configured to run in a parallel manner. Each of the clusters will run the Rocks cluster distribution, which is a Linux RedHat based cluster-toolkit. An implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI), MPICH, will be used for inter-node communication, allowing the password cracker to run in a parallel manner. Experiments were performed to test the reliability of cracking a single set of password samples on both a 32-bit and 64-bit Beowulf cluster comprised of Intel Pentium and AMD64 Opteron processors respectively. These experiments were also used to test the effectiveness of the brute-forceattack against the dictionary attack of JtR. The results from this thesis may provide assistance to organisations in enforcing strong password policies on user accounts through the use of computer clusters and also to examine the possibility of using JtR as a tool to reliably measure password strength. Optimising John the Ripper for a Clustered Environment Christian Frichot Declaration I certify that this thesis does not incorporate, without acknowledgement, any material previously submitted for a degree in any institution of higher education; and that to the best of my knowledge and belief, it does not contain any material previously written by another person except where due referenceis made in the text. Signature Date ii Optimising John the Ripper fora Clustered Environment Christian Frichot Acknowledgements I would firstlylike to thank Doctor Craig Valli for providing me with guidance and supervision over the duration of this thesis, and also for encouraging my interest in the expanding fieldof computer security and digital forensics. I would also like to thank everyone who attended our weekly research meetings or took part in the SCISSEC research group, for providing an interesting forum to discuss not only topics directly related to computer and information security, but also research methodologies and methods. In particular I would like to thank Suen Y ek, Chris Bolan, Daniel Mende, Chris Hu, Professor William Hutchinson and Mark Brogan, who patiently allowed me to ask a multitude of questions during the year regarding a wide range of topics. I would finallylike to thank my family and friends for what felt like endless support during the year, in particular my younger sister Amy, who put up with me even when I was grumpy. iii Optimising John the Ripper fora Clustered Environment Christian Frichot Table of Contents ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................................. 1 DECLARATION ................................................................................................................................... 11 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................. 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS ..................................................................................................................... IV LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................................... VI TABLE OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................... VII 1.0 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................ 1 2.0 LITERATURE REVIEW ................................................................................................................ 3 2.1 PASSWORDS AS A MEANS OF AUTHENTICATION ............................................................................. 3 2.1.1 Forms ofAuthentication ........................................................................................................ 3 2.1.2 Prevalence of Password Authentication ................................................................................ 4 2.1.3 Password Policies .................................................................................................................. 4 2.2 BREAKING PASSWORDS .................................................................................................................. 7 2.2.1 Attacking reusable passwords ................................................................................................ 7 2.2.2 The Human Factor ................................................................................................................. 9 2.2.3 The Technologyof Password Systems ................................................................................. 11 2.2.4 One-Way Hashing ................................................................................................................ 12 2.2.5 Password Cracking Tools .................................................................................................... 17 2.3 CLUSTERED COMPUTING .............................................................................................................. 18 2.3.1 Background .......................................................................................................................... 18 2.3.2 BeowulfClusters..................................... ............................................................................. 19 2.3.3 The MessagePassing Interface..................... ...................................................................... 20 2.3.4 Previous Clustered Password Cracking Solutions .............................................................. 21 2.3.5 Implications of a 64-bit Architecture ................................................................................... 22 3.0 RESEARCH QUESTIONS ........................................................................................................... 23 4.0 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY .................................................................................................. 23 4.1 EPISTEMOLOGY ............................................................................................................................ 23 4.2 RESEARCH DESIGN ....................................................................................................................... 23 4.3 THE METHODOLOGY USED FOR THIS RESEARCH .......................................................................... 24 4.4 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK........................................... ..............................................................
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