hashcat Forum

Dear all,

I'm a PhD candidate at the HighWire Centre (Lancaster University, UK). Some time ago I created this water-cooled GPU rig as part of my research into 'design fiction' (there is a photo from a talk I did at Edinburgh College of Art last year here). It ran cryptocurrency (Bitcoin and alike) mining software. With the excess heat the water is pumped through a household radiator. It is the fact that I'm using a standard white radiator that makes this thing actually quite affecting, people tend to react to it, and 'get' the point of the design fiction / speculative design.

The reason for posting here is that I want to explore other stuff that I can run on the GPUs. Cracking passwords was an obvious one. So, I've got a couple of questions.

First, I've installed oclHashcat, and, it works with the example data as far as I can tell. However, I'm kind of out of talent at this point, hence why I am asking for help here! To generate any good amount of heat in the radiator I need the GPUs (there are two, AMD 7950s) to be running flat-out for an hour or more. Is there any easy way of feeding the software a massive dataset? Or asking it to bruteforce something? Apologies if my question is rather inane... I'm playing catch up.

Second, other than running hashes/cracking passwords, does anyone have any suggestions of interesting processing that I can do with these GPUs? I realise there are various folding/SETI type applications... but, beyond those does anything come to mind?

Any help greatly appreciated!

Thanks

Yes there is an easy way just run the following:
-a 3 -m 0 -w 3 example0.hash ?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a

This should run >10 years on your system.

(03-23-2015, 09:00 PM)flopzie Wrote: [ -> ]does anyone have any suggestions of interesting processing that I can do with these GPUs? I realise there are various folding/SETI type applications... but, beyond those does anything come to mind?

Gaming ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Okay.. Thanks.

Could you just run me through what each of these parameters does...? (or point me to the relevant documentation.. and I'll attempt to understand it!)

(03-23-2015, 09:17 PM)kartan Wrote: [ -> ]Yes there is an easy way just run the following:
-a 3 -m 0 -w 3 example0.hash ?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a

This should run >10 years on your system.

Hi flopzie,

you might want to take a look at the Wiki ;-) https://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=oclhashcat#options

You'll find an Explenation for the different Attack Modes there as well :-)

well just --help might help as well.

-a 3 = bruteforce
-m 0 = md5
-w 3 = tuning preset for "most performance"
example0.hash = example md5 hashlist which is included in the archive
?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a = mask that describes plains with length 12 and "all" charsets

(03-23-2015, 09:00 PM)flopzie Wrote: [ -> ]Second, other than running hashes/cracking passwords, does anyone have any suggestions of interesting processing that I can do with these GPUs? I realise there are various folding/SETI type applications... but, beyond those does anything come to mind?

You could hunt for Mersenne primes.

Thanks for the hashcat command line info (I can confirm that my little radiator gets up to 75 degrees while running hashes!).. and thank you for the Mersenne prime suggestion, I'll definitely look into that one (also thanks to Undeath for the gaming suggestion, rest assured I've experimented with that too!)

What I'd like to do now is make the whole thing more interesting by using some 'real' data, and by showing a live readout of activity on a screen/terminal window. So could I take some file (like the one described here), have hashcat brute force the hashes, and finally show what it is doing on screen? (it doesn't really matter exactly what, as it is mainly for 'effect', however some 'relevant' data would be ideal). Could this on screen display be as simple as tailing a log file, or similar?

Again - thanks in advance.

With any luck I'll be taking a version of this work to the ACM Creativity and Cognition conference in Glasgow later this year.

Should be able to use the example0.hash and example.dict with different attack modes.

Attack modes:

0 = Straight
1 = Combination
3 = Brute-force
6 = Hybrid dict + mask
7 = Hybrid mask + dict

example:

Straight
./oclHashcat64.bin -a 0 example0.hash example.dict

Straight with Rules
./oclHashcat64.bin -a 0 example0.hash example.dict -r rules/best64.rule

Hybrid dict + mask
./oclHashcat64.bin -a 6 example0.hash example.dict ?a?a?a?a

meh.