hashcat Forum

Good morning everybody,
How we can deal with the distributed hashcat v3.00 if we don't have idea about the keyspace of the password  in other words if we don't know his length (to fix the -s and -l option) ?
Ps : I faced this problem during tests performed on hashcat v3.00 for my final project study
Thanks in advance for your answer .

Please use --keyspace. You will find out that the use of --keyspace is not allowed in combination with -i, which is required to tell hashcat to increase the mask-length with each iteration by one. So this is not black magic. You can do the same from outside which means for testing the length 1-4 you will call hashcat 4 times, but then you know the keyspace.

Thanks for your replay first. To use the "--keyspace" option the length of the password must be known to fix the mask, for example if our password contains 4 character we write : "a? a?a?a --keyspace" this command will return a value and with this value we can fix the "-s" and "-l" option. Now we suppose that i have no idea about the password i even don't know his length, what should i do in this case please? knowing that when i put "--keyspace" without putting the mask the command return the value "1"

If you don't know the password length and want to use mask attack, you can just use mask with different lengths. e.g. 4 to 7:

There are 2 features here that could help making this 4 runs into a single one:
1. using a .hcmask file (see https://hashcat.net/wiki/mask_attack#hashcat_mask_files)
2. using --increment (and --increment-min, --increment-max, in this case it would be -a 3 -i --increment-min 4 ?a?a?a?a?a?a?a)

The only problem, already mentioned above, is that --keyspace doesn't work together with these 2 features... i.e. you need to use --keyspace on a single mask, but you can just calculate the keyspace of each of them:
and distribute the load according to the keyspace values (e.g. first distribute the cracking of "4 character" passwords, then 5 character passwords, 6, 7 etc)