New Service Offers Cheap and Easy Cloud-Powered Password Cracking

CloudCracker, a new service from security researcher Moxie Marlinspike, which expands on the platform developed for WPACracker, offers penetration testers and network auditors a way to run hundreds of millions of words against a given password to test its strength.

In addition to the scope of the password cracking itself, price is another interesting factor. For just $17, an administrator or security professional can run their WPA-PSK hashes against a dictionary of 604 million words, or step-up to 1.2 billion words for $34. If one wanted to throw everything at a given hash, including the kitchen sink, then there is an option for $136 that will use 4.8 billion words.

Those using the service, likely pentesters and network auditors, can feel safe knowing the password was discovered, or secure if it’s not, the CloudCracker website explains.

“We’re really trying to push the envelope in terms of password cracking,” Marlinspike told Forbes in an interview. “Basically you get more dictionaries for your dollar, about twice the cracking power for the same price.”

Aside from WPA-PSK, CloudCracker can also tackle LAN Manager and NT LAN Manager hashes for a cost of $0.50 per recovered password.

“As an unsalted, computationally inexpensive password format, we combine both brute forcing as well as dictionary-derived words for maximum coverage,” the site explains.

Maximum coverage, when it comes to LM/NTLM hashes, equates to a dictionary worth a single size of 8,000,000,000,000.

Marlinspike now works for Twitter as a result of an acquisition of Whisper Systems in late 2011, a mobile security company he founded.

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