Brute Forcing Encryption

[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.