This makes cracking, even with an average-size dictionary - a collection of common passwords - and a very powerful hardware rig, very slow. In addition, the Ashley Madison developers used a cost factor of 12 in their implementation, meaning that each possible password an attacker wants to test needs to be put through 4,096 rounds of hashing. The success of such efforts depends on many factors: the type of hashing function used, its implementation, whether additional secret values called salts were added to the passwords, the complexity of the passwords themselves and the hardware resources available to the attackers.īcrypt is more computationally intensive than some other functions like MD5, which favors performance over brute-force protection.

This is known as hash cracking and involves running a very large number of possible passwords through the exact same algorithm that was used to generate the original hashes and looking for matches. However, recovering the original password from a hash is sometimes possible by using brute-force methods. The procedure is not supposed to be reversible unless the algorithm is flawed.

A clear text string, like a password, is run through an algorithm, typically multiple times, in order to generate a unique string of characters that serves as its representation.

A few weeks ago such a feat seemed impossible because security experts quickly observed from the leaked data that Ashley Madison stored passwords in hashed form - a common security practice - using a cryptographic function called bcrypt.

Hash cracking website