keyspace vs speed and time estimated

[philsmd]

There are 2 different definitions of "keyspace" here:
1. the first of them is the "keyspace" for a sequence of 8 upper case characters, i.e. 26 ^ 8 = 208827064576 (note: you can see this also within the progress line of the status output):

Code:

Progress.......: x/208827064576 (0.00%)

2. the internal "keyspace" that oclHashcat uses (also see https://hashcat.net/wiki/frequently_aske...a_keyspace), which you can see in the restore point line:

Code:

Restore.Point..: 0/8031810176 (0.00%)

very roughly speaking this is just the number of iterations of the "outer loop" that oclHashcat uses (base loop). The output of --keyspace reports exactly this value and is mainly used for distributed cracking (-s / -l), but also good to know when we are speaking about the --restore feature etc. --keyspace will not report the result of 26 ^ 8 which of course doesn't make much sense because everyone could calculate it easily (and as said it is even showed in the progress line)... instead the "keyspace" that oclHashcat uses is much more difficult to calculate, because it depends on various things and hence it makes sense to "just run --keyspace" to know the max. values for distributing the keyspace with -s / -l etc.