During the early part of 2015 I was fairly interested in cryptography. In particular, I was interested in penetration testing of all sorts – accounts, WEP and WPA wifi password cracking, etc. Of course, I was only cracking  accounts I owned.

The pinnacle of my interest with pen testing came when I decided to make a password cracker. For example, say my password is C0d3BR3ND4N!. You enter a few words that you think your target would include in their password, as well as a few parameters, and let it go. The magical components for my password would simply be brendan and code, input with the parameters –H (includes capital permutations as well as numbers substituted for letters), –P !#(adds ! and numbers 0-9 before and after each possible password), and -w (writes to file), and after a few seconds, the program would find my password with relative ease.

Portion of the words generated.

It essentially mashes all the words it was given together, finds all of the capital permutations and all forms of numbers switched with letters, etc., then adds it to the file.

Terminal display.

Because this program can crack passwords, I’ll refrain from posting the source code. You can, however, access the .txt file I generated for the purposes of this post here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz_0wgRmDpKqNHFtU2pLZV96SDg/view?usp=sharing