Book Image

Hands-On Cryptography with Python

By : Samuel Bowne
Book Image

Hands-On Cryptography with Python

By: Samuel Bowne

Overview of this book

Cryptography is essential for protecting sensitive information, but it is often performed inadequately or incorrectly. Hands-On Cryptography with Python starts by showing you how to encrypt and evaluate your data. The book will then walk you through various data encryption methods,such as obfuscation, hashing, and strong encryption, and will show how you can attack cryptographic systems. You will learn how to create hashes, crack them, and will understand why they are so different from each other. In the concluding chapters, you will use three NIST-recommended systems: the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA), and the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA). By the end of this book, you will be able to deal with common errors in encryption.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Challenge 1 – cracking Windows hashes


After a review of Windows hashing and an example of 1-digit hashing, we will give you two challenges—one with a 2-digit password and one with a 7-digit password. Here's how Windows hashes look in Python:

The algorithm uses hashlib to do an MD4 for the hash of the password, but before you do that, encode in Unicode which is utf-16le, and then calculate the hexdigest of the results to get the long number, The number starts with 464, in this case, which is a Windows password hash.

Thus, you can write a program that will try all the characters in this string, which will consist of 10 digits, and then calculate the hash for each one of them. You will be left with a simple dictionary with 10 values:

You can crack this 1-digit hash using a 1-digit password as follows:

So, here's a challenge. The password is a 2-digit one between 00 and 99, and this is the hash:

So, you have to make a loop that tries 100 possible values.

The next one is a 7-digit password, and this...