A short back-of-the-envelope calculation:
For arguments sake, let's say my alphabet is a-zA-Z0-9€. If I need try crack an 8 character password that may contain any of these characters encoded in UTF8, the most straightforward approach seems to be to tell hashcat to try all combinations that are 8-24 bytes long, using a "charset" of 65 different bytes. That's 65^24 (+ 65^23 + 65^22 + ... + 62^8), which is completely intractable.
What I really want to do is crack all combinations that are 8 characters long, using a charset that contains 63 characters. That is 63^8 and takes a couple of days or so.
To avoid the worst case of 65^24 I guess I have to assume a maximum of just a few multichar bytes, split those into separate charsets, and create lots of different masks to place them in all possible positions. But since hashcat doesn't seem to be widechar aware, this will still be wasting time on invalid code points, especially in the case of 3 and 4 byte characters.
Or am I missing something? Does hashcat really not support wide characters?
For arguments sake, let's say my alphabet is a-zA-Z0-9€. If I need try crack an 8 character password that may contain any of these characters encoded in UTF8, the most straightforward approach seems to be to tell hashcat to try all combinations that are 8-24 bytes long, using a "charset" of 65 different bytes. That's 65^24 (+ 65^23 + 65^22 + ... + 62^8), which is completely intractable.
What I really want to do is crack all combinations that are 8 characters long, using a charset that contains 63 characters. That is 63^8 and takes a couple of days or so.
To avoid the worst case of 65^24 I guess I have to assume a maximum of just a few multichar bytes, split those into separate charsets, and create lots of different masks to place them in all possible positions. But since hashcat doesn't seem to be widechar aware, this will still be wasting time on invalid code points, especially in the case of 3 and 4 byte characters.
Or am I missing something? Does hashcat really not support wide characters?