Brute Forcing Encryption

[Andrew Schreiber]

Lostmage333 Has gotten the phrase used to generate these hashes. In the interest of not ruining this week for everyone though the answer won't be revealed yet.

As a hint, the length of this phrase is short enough that rainbow tables become a viable option.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Pat Fairbanks has also gotten a solution using Python to brute force the answer. It took roughly 14 hours.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Pat Fairbanks has also gotten a solution using Python to brute force the answer. It took roughly 14 hours.

Could we learn what computers these were done on?

[Pat Fairbank]

Here's the code I used for my solution. Note that since I'm not in any way a Python guru, there may be a more elegant and/or faster solution; I just didn't want to take the time to figure out how to do hashes in C/C++.

import hashlib
import time

hash = '5bd4c87976f48e6a53919d53e14025e9'
digits = [65, 65, 65, 65, 65, 65]

t0 = time.clock()

while 1:
  phrase = ''
  for i in range(0, 6):
    phrase += chr(digits[i])
  
  if hash == hashlib.md5(phrase).hexdigest():
    print phrase
    break
  
  for i in range(5, -1, -1):
    digits[i] += 1
    if digits[i] == 123:
      digits[i] = 65
      continue
    if digits[i] == 91:
      digits[i] = 97
    break

print time.clock() - t0

This was run on a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo; I ran two instances of the script at the same time so as to use both cores, with one starting at AAAAAA and the other at aAAAAA. I imagine that if you had access to something like MapReduce it would go a whole lot faster.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Congrats to LostMage and Pat on getting the correct phrase.

Sorry for the delay in posting but since we should have been celebrating the last days of summer ANYWAY Im sure most people don't mind.

MD5 3ad751c9436de4cd139e6809ac20eb07
SHA1 1dfb6ecb052c4aa08267a1a3f6be392cdb0aebd8
SHA256 46322a7ae53c06c6a52ca845229ee0753dc3f777b0c1f1598a f736f37e1185f0

14 letters, 2 words, all lower case. Keep in mind that I cannot spell. As an additional hint, this clue is related, very loosely, to the way Pat solved last weeks puzzle and my favorite colour.

Good Luck.