> I've been trying to get Pyrit working on the Centos image but have been having trouble compiling it. An 8 node cluster with Teslas is going to bring WPA-PSK cracking down to where WEP was a few years back for those who can afford it.
Are there legitimate uses for password cracking or is this about getting access to other people's accounts?
At my day job we mostly do penetration testing and incident response. Sometimes we need to crack passwords so we have these huge files called rainbow tables that can be used to look up a very high percentage of possible passwords for given algorithms, but aren't infallible and take time to search.
We sometimes crack passwords to do a password strength audit. Sometimes dictionaries aren't really enough (as someone might have chosen an obvious word in another language) so it's easier to just crack the passwords, automate analysis of the obvious and then scan through anything left behind.
WPA-PSK cracking is particularly useful in the UK Local Government sector, where local government in most cases needs to have an annual penetration test, often including their wireless networks. A lot choose WPA-PSK because it doesn't mean spending money on a full-blown wifi network.
The other thing we use password cracking for is when we do incident response work. Sometimes people encrypt things like documents or use PGP containers. This isn't quite making PGP cracking feasible, but certainly the majority of encrypted word documents should be doable with this.
Are there legitimate uses for password cracking or is this about getting access to other people's accounts?