Dictionary encoding: UTF8 or Win-1252 for German?

[takitano]

Hello everyone,

I have a question. I have a German dictionary with UTF8 encoding without signature (all characters and numbers that appear on a German keyboard including €). Which dictionary encoding is optimal for Hashcat? UTF8 or Win-1252?

Can Hashcat use UTF8-dictionaries well? In some russian forums people write, that it is better to always store the dictionaries in Win-1252 / ISO8859-1. Is that correct?

Regards,

Takeshi

[royce]

Dictionary encoding depends on the encoding used by the software that initially stored the passwords. If the software used UTF-8, hashcat will need to receive UTF-8 strings as source material. If another encoding was used, hashcat will need that encoding.

Since many passwords in the wild are web-based, UTF-8 is the de-facto standard.  If you store your dictionaries as UTF-8, but you encounter hashes with non-UTF-8-encoded plains, you can convert them as needed (either dynamically, or in advance) with iconv.

[takitano]

Thanks for the quick response. A typical German user uses a German keyboard, a German Windows and German programs. So it can be assumed that he also uses a win-1252 encoding with German umlauts. So I usually use dictionaries with Win-1252 encoding.  
In this case I could not decrypt 7-Zip-Password "яliebeтебя" (as an example). But my dictionary with UTF-8 was unable to decrypt the password. Therefore my question about UTF-8.

PS: Ok. I have antoher problem with Hashcat now. I open a new thread


Regards,
Takeshi