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Team Anachronistic

Resources

Active Members	1
Nicks	galdr
Software	John the Ripper, Cryptohaze Multiforcer
Hardware	One 8-core i7, one 4-core i5, and one GeForce GT 430 GPU

Approach

I primarily had the two machines working on non-overlapping sets of hash types and generally progressing from cheap to expensive hash types. My approach to using John was to utilize as much of the modes and rulesets as possible. Towards the end, I primarily focused on incremental modes for the most expensive hash types.

Workflow

I prepared in advance numerous shell scripts and related content that would permit me to automate long sequences of multicore runs of John, progressing from simpler hash types to harder types. Impatience and a desire for a greater volume of cracked hashes, however, caused me to frequently cancel these sequences once they progressed to the harder content. This was obviously the wrong approach as my score was quite low at the thirty hour mark. For the remaining 18 hours, I refocused my efforts on the hashes I should have focused on to begin with, most importantly MSCASH2 and BF. I really wish I had started with this approach as it paid off very quickly.

Nevertheless, as I worked on the easier content, I did create some additional John rulesets such as a trivially easy variant of the DateTime external mode to look for the high number of hyphenated dates ("02-07-10") and made some modifications to my existing l33t speak ruleset ('-zorz', '-ness', '-xor', single-letter l33ting -- certainly not as encompassing as KoreLogicRulesL33t but frequently adds a few more hits, "obsessiveness" anyone?).

Final Thoughts

I thoroughly enjoyed the competition. Despite the numerous mistakes I made, I'm quite pleased at my placement, especially being a one-man team and the predominantly 12-cores of computation (the Multiforcer work on the GPU was fairly minimal overall). I look forward to participating next year.