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cracking the code a hands on journey through cryptography hash cracking and post quantum security dev community skip to content navigation menu search powered by algolia search log in create account dev community close add reaction like unicorn exploding head raised hands fire jump to comments save boost pick as gem more copy link copy link copied to clipboard share to x share to linkedin share to facebook share to mastodon share post via report abuse khalif al mahmud posted on aug 8 cracking the code a hands on journey through cryptography hash cracking and post quantum security cybersecurity cryptography hashcat ethicalhacking ai driven cybersecurity 8 part series 1 ai in cybersecurity why artificial intelligence is both our strongest defense and a growing threat 2 linux networking scripting and ai what every beginner pentester should know 4 more parts 3 building my first lan in cisco packet tracer connecting 4 pcs through a switch 4 what my own wi fi traffic looked like under wireshark and why 88 of it wasn t even tls 5 cracking the code a hands on journey through cryptography hash cracking and post quantum security 6 hidden in plain sight steganography exif geolocation and ai powered log analysis 7 ai driven osint active recon how artificial intelligence is changing reconnaissance 8 practical reconnaissance and attack surface discovery with subfinder httpx ffuf katana and ai i ve always been fascinated by the idea that a string of random looking characters can hide something real a password a message an identity so i decided to spend some real hands on time with cryptography not just reading about it but actually cracking hashes exploring how ai is starting to change cryptanalysis and thinking through what happens to encryption once quantum computers become practical this write up walks through everything i explored from classical ciphers like caesar and vigenère to symmetric encryption aes vs des to practical hash cracking with hashcat and john and finally into asymmetric cryptography rsa and the nist post quantum cryptography standards if you re getting into cybersecurity and want a practical feel for how this stuff actually works not just textbook definitions this should be a useful walkthrough problem statement encryption and hashing are everywhere logins banking messaging but most people myself included before this treat them as a black box i wanted to answer a few concrete questions how do classical ciphers actually work and why are they broken so easily today what really separates a secure algorithm like aes from an obsolete one like des why do we salt passwords and what does a salt actually prevent can ai meaningfully speed up hash identification and cracking how does public private key cryptography rsa work under the hood why is quantum computing considered a real threat to today s encryption and what is the industry doing about it to make this concrete i set up a kali linux vm and worked through a batch of unknown hashes identifying and cracking each one using real tools instead of just theory step by step walkthrough 1 setting up the environment i used kali linux in virtualbox with hashid hashcat and john the ripper all pre installed on kali plus the classic rockyou txt wordlist first thing the wordlist ships compressed and permission locked so it needs to be unzipped with elevated privileges cd usr share wordlists gunzip rockyou txt gz enter fullscreen mode exit fullscreen mode if you hit a permission denied error very common just escalate first sudo su gunzip rockyou txt gz enter fullscreen mode exit fullscreen mode 2 identifying unknown hash types before you can crack a hash you need to know what kind of hash it is hashid is great for a quick first guess hashid 3580c9267518807d14803ab6821fa067b4dba1210a4148a243b9e9383bae6a1e enter fullscreen mode exit fullscreen mode for trickier or more ambiguous hashes i also cross checked against an online hash identifier tool which gave confidence scores and useful context e g this format is most commonly seen in windows ad ntds dumps 3 cracking with hashcat once i had a working hash mode guess i saved the hash to a file and ran it against rockyou txt echo paste_hash_here hash1 txt hashcat m 1400 a 0 hash1 txt usr share wordlists rockyou txt enter fullscreen mode exit fullscreen mode m 1400 tells hashcat the hash type in this case sha 256 a 0 means a straight dictionary attack to see the cracked result hashcat m 1400 show hash1 txt enter fullscreen mode exit fullscreen mode i repeated this same process for several hashes of different types sha 256 sha 512 and raw md5 just swapping the m mode number to match each algorithm 4 cracking salted bcrypt hashes with john the ripper not every hash plays nicely with hashcat s default modes especially bcrypt for those john handled it well john hash5 txt wordlist usr share wordlists rockyou txt enter fullscreen mode exit fullscreen mode bcrypt is intentionally slow that s the point it resists brute force so this one took noticeably longer to crack than the sha based hashes to reveal the result john hash5 txt show enter fullscreen mode exit fullscreen mode 5 practicing on tryhackme s crack the hash room to push further i worked through tryhackme s crack the hash room https tryhackme com room crackthehash which throws a mix of easy and progressively harder hashes at you including salted hashes where the salt is given separately and has to be appended prepended correctly before cracking this part really reinforced why salting matters without knowing the exact salt and how it s combined with the password even a correct wordlist guess won t produce a matching hash digging into the theory classical ciphers caesar vigenère the caesar cipher just shifts every letter by a fixed number of positions with only 25 possible shifts it s trivial to brute force the vigenère cipher improves on this by using a repeating keyword so each letter of the plaintext gets a different shift value it resists simple brute force but a technique called kasiski examination can still recover the key length by spotting repeated patterns in the ciphertext and from there the cipher falls aes vs des des aes key size 56 bit 128 192 256 bit status today obsolete crackable in hours industry standard used for legacy systems government modern encryption des simply wasn t built for today s compute power aes especially at 256 bit remains effectively unbreakable with current classical hardware why salting matters without a salt two users with the password password123 end up with identical hashes which is exactly what precomputed rainbow tables exploit a salt is a random value mixed in before hashing so identical passwords produce completely different hashes forcing an attacker to crack each one individually where ai fits into cryptanalysis this was the part i found most interesting ai isn t replacing traditional tools like hashcat it s making the guessing smarter predicting likely hash algorithms from structure length faster than rule based identifiers learning patterns from leaked password datasets to generate more realistic candidate passwords common substitutions suffix patterns etc instead of pure brute force speeding up the reconnaissance phase in ctf style challenges by identifying cipher encoding types automatically i also drafted a reusable prompt template for using an llm to systematically break a caesar cipher trying all 25 shifts evaluating which output reads as real english and clearly stating the result you are a cryptanalysis expert i have an intercepted message that appears to be encoded using a caesar cipher encrypted message ciphertext here please do the following 1 try all 25 possible shift values 1 through 25 2 show the decrypted output for each shift 3 identify which shift produces readable english text 4 state the correct shift value and the final plaintext 5 briefly explain how you identified the correct decryption enter fullscreen mode exit fullscreen mode rsa and public private keys rsa relies on a simple asymmetry in difficulty multiplying two large primes is fast but factoring the resulting product back into those primes is extremely hard anyone can encrypt a message with my public key but only my private key can decrypt it which is what makes secure communication over an untrusted channel possible in the first place the quantum threat two quantum algorithms change the picture shor s algorithm can factor large numbers exponentially faster than classical computers which would break rsa outright if a sufficiently powerful quantum computer existed grover s algorithm effectively halves the strength of symmetric keys so a 256 bit aes key would offer roughly the security of a 128 bit key against a quantum attacker that s why nist ran a multi year competition and in 2024 finalized its first post quantum cryptography pqc standards crystals kyber for key exchange encryption and crystals dilithium ml dsa for digital signatures both based on lattice problems believed to resist quantum attacks how to verify if you want to reproduce any of this yourself spin up a kali linux vm or use any distro with hashcat john and hashid installed download rockyou txt and place it in usr share wordlists save a hash to a txt file identify its type with hashid then run the matching hashcat m mode command confirm the crack with hashcat show or john show try tryhackme s crack the hash room yourself for a structured escalating challenge set what i learned working through this hands on rather than just reading about it changed how i think about secure systems a few things stuck with me cryptography is only as strong as its weakest implementation detail looking at you missing salts hash cracking is really a wordlist and rules problem the algorithm matters less than how predictable the underlying password is ai s real value right now is in speeding up identification and guessing not magically breaking strong encryption post quantum cryptography isn t science fiction planning anymore nist already has finalized standards and the migration is already underway in parts of the industry common mistakes table mistake why it happens fix guessing the wrong hashcat mode m similar length hashes sha 256 vs others look alike cross check with a hash identifier tool before running hashcat forgetting to unzip permission fix rockyou txt wordlist ships compressed and root owned on kali sudo gunzip rockyou txt gz before first use ignoring salts on salted hashes salt isn t hashed the same way in every format check the exact salt placement prefix suffix required by that hash type assuming aes 256 is quantum proof aes resists shor s algorithm but not grover s understand grover only weakens aes it doesn t fully break it treating ai hash cracking as magic ai still needs data patterns to learn from use ai to speed up identification guessing not as a silver bullet conclusion cryptography sits at the foundation of almost everything we trust online and there s a real gap between knowing the definitions and actually being able to identify crack and reason about these systems hands on this exercise pushed me to close some of that gap and it also made the post quantum conversation feel a lot less abstract if you re working through similar material i d genuinely recommend setting up a lab and cracking a few hashes yourself rather than just reading the theory ai driven cybersecurity 8 part series 1 ai in cybersecurity why artificial intelligence is both our strongest defense and a growing threat 2 linux networking scripting and ai what every beginner pentester should know 4 more parts 3 building my first lan in cisco packet tracer connecting 4 pcs through a switch 4 what my own wi fi traffic looked like under wireshark and why 88 of it wasn t even tls 5 cracking the code a hands on journey through cryptography hash cracking and post quantum security 6 hidden in plain sight steganography exif geolocation and ai powered log analysis 7 ai driven osint active recon how artificial intelligence is changing reconnaissance 8 practical reconnaissance and attack surface discovery with subfinder httpx ffuf katana and ai top comments 0 subscribe personal trusted user create template templates let you quickly answer faqs or store snippets for re use submit preview dismiss code of conduct report abuse are you sure you want to hide this comment it will become hidden in your post but will still be visible via the comment s permalink hide child comments as well confirm for further actions you may consider blocking this person and or reporting abuse khalif al mahmud follow security research practice ms in cyber security ceh certified ex software engineer joined oct 22 2024 more from khalif al mahmud practical reconnaissance and attack surface discovery with subfinder httpx ffuf katana and ai cybersecurity bugbounty reconnaissance ethicalhacking i set up a fake internet to catch a trojan analyzing flexenseactivator exe cybersecurity infosec 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