What makes cracking faster for a given algorithm

[phhebert]

Hi there,

I'm really new to cracking and I would like to understand what makes hashcat runs slow or fast in terms of H/s according to the hashing algorithm. If I run hashcat over md5, it is substantially faster with millions of hashes per second while sha512crypt hashes could barely reach a thousand hashes per second.

Thank you very much

[royce]

The answer should be intuitive.

Some algorithms are literally much 'faster' than others. If the hash wasn't really designed for cracking-resistant password storage - such as MD5 - then it's quite fast to attack because the math required to perform the calculation is trivial.

By contrast, if a hash *was* designed to be cracking-resistant (for example, by requiring thousands of rounds of an operation or other 'stretching' techniques) - such as scrypt, bcrypt, etc. - then it will be slow to crack.