An Overview of Study of Passowrd Cracking

This paper studies the current status and advance of study of password cracking. First, we give a classification for password cracking from different dimensions. We studies brute-force cracking, dictionary cracking and rainbow table cracking. We found some new techniques such as brute-force cracking based on probability method, Markov models and data mining. High performance computing in password cracking is also studied, we found that more and more password cracking system using GPU platform or FPGA platform. We indicate that the password cracking techniques will develop with the growth of computing technology. The integration of various methods will increase the speed and success probability of password cracking.