

Free TrueCrypt Hard Drive Password Cracking - 16s
http://16s.us/TCHead/cracked/

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atarian
>Strong passwords will not be cracked. It's not possible.

What qualifies as a "strong password" against such a tool?

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16s
For whole disk encryption (WDE) or any sort of password protected service
where you cannot execute software (primary authentication), I encourage the
use of pass phrases. Dice ware is nice. Something such as this:

"lua ham purple day girl"

The challenge with primary authentication passwords is that users typically
cannot use a password manager or generator to recall the password and thus
must be able to recall something that they can easily type and end-up
selecting weak passwords. There are some exceptions to this (yubikey, etc) but
most normal users don't or cannot use them for various reasons, so go with a
nice pass phrase like the one above.

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cowsaysoink
For disk encryption and keepass databases I like to go with full sentence but
odd passphrases.

Like:

    
    
        Cats and cows eat 200 tables a day.
        
        The grape is 14 shades of orange.

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dustinrodrigues

        correct horse battery staple

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dgesang
Can't wait to see some dox released where someone actually used this one. :)

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ditoa
For those on Windows without access to a *nix machine you can grab a Windows
binary of dd at <http://www.chrysocome.net/dd> the command arguments are the
same as on the site.

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jakubp
Can someone explain in plain English what is the purpose of this tool for an
actual TrueCrypt user? I'm confused what it does, other than perhaps
demonstrating weakness of certain passwords, or maybe some vulnerability in
the way TC works.

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lambada
As I understand it, it attempts to decrypt a TC volume (and any hidden volume
contained within) by brute-forcing the password and using a dictionary of some
kind.

Essentially it just tries to open the volume with many passwords in quick
succession. So there isn't a vulnerability in Truecrypt itself, and complex /
long passwords are unlikely to be found with this tool.

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joelthelion
If the dictionnary attack is very fast, it is a vulnerability in TrueCrypt.

A good encryption scheme uses a slow hashing scheme and salt to defeat such
attacks.

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lambada
For the Header Keys (which I believe this is what the attack is going after -
as that is what the password unlocks), TC does use a Salt. See [0]

And for slow hashing schemes that is a fair point, but when you're looking at
file decryption, there is nothing to stop parallel attempts happening at once
on different machines. Also TC does support using cascading ciphers which can
help to slow it down.

Note: I'm not an expert in Cryptography by any means, but this is my current
understanding.

[0] <http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/header-key-derivation>

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LammyL
It says they are only doing 1000 (or 2000) hash iterations to derive the key,
and it seems like it is too few iterations to be much of a brute force
deterrent these days. I would have expected something like 100000 iterations,
or 1 second or more of calculation time on a modern CPU.

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jrockway
Does TrueCrypt apply a key strengthening step to the password?

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tedunangst
2k round pbkdf2 iirc.

