A New Time-Memory-Resource Trade-Off Method for Password Recovery

Exhaustive key search is a simple and effective way to crack a cryptosystem, but it often causes large time and space consumption. From the original time-space trade-off method to the rainbow chain method, all of the algorithms are improvements of the exhaustive key search, whose objectives are to achieve the balance between the crack time and the storage memory. As the popularization of the strong cryptography, it is difficult to get the ideal crack time for the algorithms based on the rainbow chain. In this paper, we introduce the concept of multi-resources to design the time-memory-resource trade-off method. In the method, through the distributed protocol, multi-resources run as a whole to achieve the balance among the crack time, the storage memory and the computing resources. The experiment results in windows login password crack show that the crack time is almost a linear decline with the increase of the number of resources since the additional communication costs are small.