A challenge to programmers with some time on their hands

[K.I.L.E.R]

Enter a 5 digit password and time how long it takes for your algorithm to crack it.

I'm not saying to go out and crack systems.
Make your own test bed.

Here's mine:

3 classes:
Store - store a password and get a password

Crack - create array list which stores passwords already used and randomly generates a password.

Main - test randomly generated password against stored password.

It had taken 2 seconds the first time, 2nd time I got bored of waiting. It's done by randomly generating numbers. Guess I'm just lucky. Probability is brought into the equation through randomly generating the password. So time is always going to be random.

Of course the password is numeric, not alphanumeric.

 

[Nathan]

I'm getting less than 0.01 seconds.

That was just a simple loop incrementing from 0 till it reached the password.

 

[Althornin]

thats only 100,000 possible combos.
That should take barely any time at all, definately under a second.
I wrote assembly code that calculated all prime numbers under 1 million on a 486 is less than a second...

 

[gokickrocks]

the loop would probably be the simplest and an efficient way to code it (O time)...

i dont understand why you would store used passwords in an arraylist, just imagine the worst case scenario...you randomly generate a pw (and if you generated your random number based on time, you may get the same number over and over again), before you store you need to iterate through the arraylist to see if its already been done, if its not, then you add it and repeat

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

Boy my algorithm must be fudged if it's supposed to take under a second.

 

[sorak]

Boy my algorithm must be fudged if it's supposed to take under a second.

That, or your computer is very slow 8)

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

Boy my algorithm must be fudged if it's supposed to take under a second.

That, or your computer is very slow 8)

P4 1.8GHz with 768MB RAM, it was compiled on both Java and C#.

I hadn't benched C# but my Java one had taken 3 mins and 45 seconds to find the appropriate password. :?

 

[Nameless]

Boy my algorithm must be fudged if it's supposed to take under a second.

That, or your computer is very slow 8)

P4 1.8GHz with 768MB RAM, it was compiled on both Java and C#.

I hadn't benched C# but my Java one had taken 3 mins and 45 seconds to find the appropriate password. :?

Are you doing it sequentially?

If not you're probably getting a lot of overhead from rand. Also if you are making sure your number hasn't been tested before there is overhead there. If you're not, then you're most likely checking some numbers multiple times.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

Boy my algorithm must be fudged if it's supposed to take under a second.

That, or your computer is very slow 8)

P4 1.8GHz with 768MB RAM, it was compiled on both Java and C#.

I hadn't benched C# but my Java one had taken 3 mins and 45 seconds to find the appropriate password. :?

Are you doing it sequentially?

If not you're probably getting a lot of overhead from rand. Also if you are making sure your number hasn't been tested before there is overhead there. If you're not, then you're most likely checking some numbers multiple times.

Thanks, going to try that sometime tonight.

 

[Mark0]

I have done that in a "real world" scenario, to crack the POP3 mail password of a friend!
He was saying that his password consist in 5 digit/number. I pointed out that it was so insecure, but it was not convinced.

Until, 1 hour later, I sent him his password!

Off course the POP3 server wasn't very smart, as if it simply refused access to a specific account for 1 minute, if the last 5 try was wrong, it may have been a much, much longer process.

Bye!