PTCoreSec - Because Security Matters

For a year now, I’ve been a member of a Portuguese security research group named PTCoreSec. It all started as a way to give something back to the infosec community. As you probably have noticed I really don’t have much time to keep this blog flowing with regular posts, but I’ve gathered the time I could to help PTcoreSec, which I believe provides help and education about information security problems to professionals and the common citizen alike, and that’s something to be proud of. Besides, the team is just amazing and the fun never ends!

I contribute to the team with the blog posts I write, worked in a couple of Capture the Flag challenges for the 2012 Just4Meeting, in particular one I’m very proud of, but perhaps I’ll write a post about that. I’ve also been invited to write an article for a Portuguese online technology magazine, curious enough it coincided with a new box I’ve assembled with a state of the art graphics card.

As I’m keen on password auditing, I’ve choosen this topic for the article. Giving a quick intro about hashes, salt and cracking techniques, and with the help of @synchroack, we’ve benchmarked hashcat against md5, sha1, sha256, sha512 and md5 + salt via GPU and via CPU.

Besides the outstanding results, this article also provides all the information needed to successfully audit passwords on a relatively cheap hardware configuration. Curious enough, our article was voted the best of that edition and here’s the prize T-Shirt to prove it :)

You can find the magazine below, but I must warn you it’s written in Portuguese, nonetheless the benchmark data speaks for itself and any question you may have feel free to ask me, I’ll gladly help.

Get the magazine