different attack types

[ttilt]

Hi,

I've been looking everywhere for a thorough documentation on the different attack types supported by hashcat but haven't been able to find much. For example:
1) what are the differences between straight words and combination.
2) the "toggle case" attack type is the same as using rule "t"? If so why make it a separate attack type? What do the toggle case min-max do?
3) What is the permutation attack type? What do the perm-min and perm-max do?


Thanks,
JC

[atom]

3) What is the permutation attack type? What do the perm-min and perm-max do?

quick example: word from dictionary is "abc", permutation attack mutates it to:

abc
acb
bac
bca
cab
cba

tip: your dictionaries can be optimized for permutation attack by removing duplicates. for example if you have these two words in your dictionary "abc" and "acb" they generate exactly the same words. so you should remove them. to do this use the "prepare" program from hashcat-utils and sort -u them afterwards.

[ttilt]

1) what are the differences between straight words and combination.

"Straight words" literally just tries the exact words that are in your chosen wordlists, with no modifications other than rules, if you chose to use any.

Combination combines the current word with the rest of the words in the wordfile. For example say your wordlist is

aa
bb
cc
dd

It will generate hashes for the keys aabb, aacc, aadd, bbcc, bbdd, ccdd, all modified by whatever rules you are using. For this reason combination attacks begin to take a long, long time when used with a large wordlist.

2) the "toggle case" attack type is the same as using rule "t"? If so why make it a separate attack type? What do the toggle case min-max do?

I believe the rule t just inverts the cases of all the letters in the current word once. Say the word is aBCdEf, once modified by rule t it would be AbcDeF. Toggle case, on the other hand, tries every possible case combination for the given word-- abcdef, Abcdef, aBcdef, etc. until all possible scenarios have been tried.

3) What is the permutation attack type? What do the perm-min and perm-max do?

You'll have to get someone else for that one, I really have no clue.

Tks for the explanation! But if the combination attack combines each word w/ EVERY other word then it would make it by far the slowest attack type right?

[atom]

absolutly not. for example if you limit the attack to --perm-min=8 and --perm-max=8 it will only use words of length 8. N! function of 8 = 40320. so it requires 40320 * number of words (with length 8) in your dictionary to finish. thats not to much. for example if you have a combination attack with a dictionary that holds "just" 80000 words in it it will take longer.

[atom]

check the wiki for all the attack types under menu "Attack modes". thread closed.