hashcat Forum

I have noticed the hashcat keyspace in both hybrid attacks (-a 6 and -a 7) is determined by the number of passwords in dictionary. That means, when I want to split the attack into more instances, my --limit and --skip arguments affect these dictionary passwords.

However, the mask can be quite long and the instance for a single password + mask can take hours, days or more to finish. For example, this instance with 1 dictionary password would take 3+ days for me:


Is there a possibility to split this job into more instances, that would each take less time? Maybe by affecting the start/stop-indexes of the mask?

Looking forward to your answer!

the only ways to reduce the time needed for one chunck even further than -l 1 is to use lower -n/-u values (which affects the speed) or to reduce the number of hashes (which is also counter-productive in general if you need to test all of them)

Maybe the best answer to your question is a counterquestion: Do you really need to bruteforce bcrypt hashes? Maybe there are better alternatives than mask attack which you didn't exploit yet?

Thanks for the reply.

My question was rather theoretical. I'm aware that example above is not a very useful one.
Considering a distributed solution using hashcat, where the user would be able to set an approximate duration of each distributed instance of an attack - looks like the hybrid attack could be a problem here, as the minimal times of an instance (such as the one above) can be very long, regardless the user settings.

Anyway, thanks for your help!

hashcat64.exe -a 7 test.hash ?l?l?l?l?l smallDict.txt --stdout -o new.txt

then use -a0 new.txt instead

you will have a larger --keyspace range to operate and distribute

This indeed solves the problem with timing. However, it creates a whole lot of passwords, which can be a problem to distribute among clients (that could be even geographically distant).

But I guess, with some effort, this can be implemented on the client side, after receiving the one password + mask and some and some extra info about the indexing.

Thank you for this idea, atom!