Security services firm Trustwave has released an open source project aimed at companies that want to provide password-cracking as a service to their security teams and red teams, the company announced today at the Black Hat Europe conference.
Using the new CrackQ platform, companies can run periodic checks on their own systems or give red teams a resource for cracking password hashes taken from clients during an engagement, providing businesses with metrics on password quality and statistics on the tool's use. Written in Python and based on the Web-application framework Flask, the platform is extensible and already includes a graphing library for creating plots in the dashboard, says Dan Turner, principal security consultant at Trustwave's SpiderLabs
"The dashboard really helps to visualize the weaknesses there [in password selection]," he says. "A viable use case is a security team using it internally to check passwords, but it is primarily for offensive teams to use during an engagement."
Because they are chosen by users, passwords have always been a weak link in corporate security. A study by Virginia Tech, for example, found slightly more than half of users reused passwords or used variants of the same password. Fifty-six percent of passwords only required 10 guesses to crack, according to the study.
Trustwave regularly finds similar numbers. More than half of the passwords the company's red teams have taken from Windows Domain Controllers usually can be broken by password-cracking tools, such as Hashcat, the program that powers CrackQ, Turner says. Often, the failure rate is closer to ..
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