I had the need to generate a password dictionary that would cover every possible combination for a defined character set.  I first learned to program in Python so I was going to start there first.  Before writing the program I decided to Google and see if anyone else had tackled this problem via Python, turned out they had.  Siph0n posted his Python code to create a password dictionary over at the BackTrack forums.  I wanted to post it here as a mirror and to discuss the implications of creating a password dictionary with every possible combination.  Below is the Python code.

If you’re familiar with programming and Python in particular then you could just grab the code and roll but I really wanted to discuss the usefulness of an application like this.  First I will discuss the basics of how to get this program up and running but will eventually jump into other implications such as time, storage, and usefulness of a password dictionary.

How to install and use the program

1. You must have Python installed.  If you’re running Linux (you should be) then it’s probably already installed.  If you’re running then Windows then you will have to download Python.
2. Now that you have Python installed simply copy and paste the code above into a text file and name it passwordDictionaryGenerator.py.  The .py extension is needed because that’s how Python recognizes code that it’s suppose to execute.
3. Modify appropriate variables within the program.  The only variables you may want to modify are numb, cap, and low.  These variables contain the ASCII equivalent ranges for the letters and numbers you will be using to generate your dictionary.  You may want to modify these variables so that your dictionary does not contain a-z but only a-k, I’ll leave that up to you.
4. Now to run the program simply type
   python passwordDictionaryGenerator.py

   You will have to answer the questions about which character set you want to use and how long / short your password dictionary is going to be.  Once you answer the questions it may seem like the program isn’t doing anything but it is, it will spit you back to the command line once the program has completed.  The output will be a file called wordlist.

So now you have this cool program that can generate a password dictionary for you, how big (size MB, GB, TB, etc) will this dictionary be?  How long will it take to generate this dictionary?  Let’s tackle the size question first as it will help us calculate the time as well.  The key to calculating the size is a math term called permutations.  Permutations is a simple equation to determine the number of words for that particular character set and length of word.  The basic equation is below.

n^r

n = total character set (e.g.  a-z + A-Z + 0-9 = 62)

r = length of the word

Now you’ll have to calculate n^r for each length to get every possible combination.  So for a 6 digit long password your equation will look like the following.

n⁶ + n⁵ + n⁴ + n³ + n² + n¹ = every possible combination

Let’s try an example where our character set is a-z (n = 26) and our password is no longer than 6 (r = 1-6) digits, how many words will be in our dictionary?

26⁶ + 26⁵ + 26⁴ + 26³ + 26² + 26¹ = 321,272,406 = total # of words

So now we understand how to calculate the total number of words in our dictionary.  How does that relate to the size?  Well for the most part if the length of the password is x then the size in bytes will be x + 1 for that particular line.  Then all we have to do is multiply each n^r times the size of that particular line to get the size for that particular length.  That may have just sound really confusing so hopefully the following graph clears that up some.

I went ahead and generated this dictionary, it took about 30 minutes.  Turns out the size matched my calculations.

So now you have the basic formula for calculating the size of your desired dictionary.  Let’s take a look at a larger example just to cure our curiosity.  Let’s assume the following parameters.

• character set = a-z, A-Z, & 0-9
• password length = 1-8
• n = 62
• r = 1 – 8

With these parameters the size of our dictionary jumps to 1,800 terabytes or 1.8 petabytes. Take a look at the chart below.

You can see how quickly the size jumps up. I don’t know about you but I don’t have a two petabyte drive lying around. Generating this dictionary is just infeasible. I did calculate the time it would probably take to generate this dictionary, it came out to be about 11 days. So the time to create such a dictionary is nothing compared to the storage required to house it. Not only that I don’t know to many applications that can handle a large dictionary as input, so that’s another factor you’ll have to keep in mind when generating your dictionary.

Calculating the time it takes to generate these dictionaries I’ll leave up to you.  The basic idea is that you can run the python program for a particular length password for a set amount of time and then extrapolate form there.  For the most part time isn’t really a factor but storage is. The concepts I’ve talked about here are nothing new. The idea of generating a password came to me and my coworkers as we were thinking of ways to test a WPA wireless infrastructure. Attacking WPA can be done offline so we were thinking of generating a dictionary to accomplish this. Hours later we soon realized the difficulty with generating such a large dictionary. This was actually good news because it meant that an attacker would have an extremely difficult time attacking a WPA access point with a complex password. Renderman and the Church of Wifi have thought about this problem way before I did and came up with some rainbow tables to help test the strength of your WPA access point. You can’t really create a dictionary with every single combination for a lengthy password, your best bet is to create a dictionary with the most “common” passwords, which is no easy task either.

The moral of the story is to use lengthy complex passwords with a high character set, but you knew that already. So I just suggested that this program is somewhat useless, well it is but it isn’t. You can use this program to generate a small dictionary but a large dictionary (greater than a couple of terabytes) is probably out of the question. So use this program and let me know what your results are, I’m always interested in your feedback. Happy cracking.

Determine version locally / with access

or

Determine version remotely

or

With netcat you may see weird output, example is below

In this case the version is 4.1.20, so you’ll have to read through the mess that is netcat output.

Sometimes when you want to grab the bleeding edge version of software you’ll need to utilize subversion (SVN). You can go and read Wikipedia’s take on SVN but basically SVN can be used to grab the latest snapshot of software. Grabbing Metasploit through SVN is the best way to get the latest exploits, payload, scanners, and auxiliary components. If you were to grab Metasploit from it’s main page you would be missing a lot of that functionality, this is where SVN comes into play. Unfortunately I’m not able to grab the latest version of Metasploit because my organization has restrictive firewalls and proxies preventing me from using the SVN protocol. So the best way around this problem is to wrap the application, SVN in this case, inside of a tunneled proxy for transporting. The best implementation I’ve found for doing that is using SOCKS proxies.

The basic goal of this article is to explain to others how to tunnel an application in a SOCKS proxy that doesn’t support SOCKS proxies. A SOCKS proxy is another network protocol but what’s special about SOCKS is that it doesn’t rely on the underlying packet to do it’s routing. SOCKS handles the routing and basically just creates an envelope for whatever it’s “wrapping up”. SOCKS can work with lots of protocols (HTTP, FTP, SMTP, etc) and lots of applications (Firefox, Internet Explorer, OpenSSH, etc). One useful example of using a SOCKS proxy is tunneling HTTP traffic through an SSH tunnel. This can be accomplished because both Firefox and SSH have support for SOCKS proxies. Refer to my earlier article concerning tunneling HTTP over SSH. One application / protocol that SOCKS does not work with is SVN, so then how can you tunnel SVN. Proxychains to the rescue.

Proxychains is the coolest thing since sliced bread. If an application doesn’t support SOCKS then Proxychains will make it support SOCKS. Proxychains basically SOCKSifies applications. The main reason to SOCKSify an application is so that you can tunnel it through SSH because SSH supports SOCKS. So how do you download Metasploit through restrictive firewalls? The answer is ProxyChains + SVN + SSH = latest Metasploit. So enough with the yip yapping how does all this work, below are instructions.

Requirements

1. Internet facing listening SSH server
2. Linux client (client being your laptop or desktop) with SSH
3. Proxychains on client
4. SVN on client

You may could perform all of these steps in Windoze but why would you? Besides all of my instructions will be Linux based. Once you’ve got Proxychains installed (see proxychains INSTALL file) the next thing to do is edit it’s config file proxychains.conf. In my situation all I had to modify were two lines. I first commented out the line that says dynamic_chain as seen below.

Next we’ll tell proxychains to use our localhost as the proxy and which port to connect to. At the very bottom of your conf file you’ll need to add the following.

I randomly chose port 4545. I usually choose a port higher than 1024 because you don’t need root privileges to use higher ports. Now your proxychains config file is set. Now let’s create the ssh tunnel.

In my case it would be

The -D flag tells ssh to listen on your localhost (127.0.0.1) and forward that connection to your remote host, in my case 74.208.13.81. Now that you’ve got proxychains configured and your ssh tunnel is up and running you’re ready to go. We don’t need to configure SVN we just need to have the client installed. So now that you’ve got everything up and running simply issue the command below to download the latest Metasploit.

What this final command will do is use proxychains to wrap the SVN protocol into your ssh tunnel thus allowing you to download the latest version of Metasploit behind a restrictive firewall, pretty nifty huh.

Keep in mind this will download metasploit into whatever directory you happen to be in. If for example you wanted to download metasploit into your home directory (e.g /home/travis) then issue the following command.

Also keep in mind that in the above examples proxychains is assumed to be a recognized command and is set in your path. I installed proxychains in my /opt directory so I had to issue the proxychains command below.

Happy sploiting and downloading, hope this explanation helps.

I teach network secuirty at ECPI College of Technology. At the end of every class students present their projects for the course. One group put together a video of their project and I figured it would be a good idea to post it. It’s about 27 minutes and goes over a hand full of things, one of the neatest being the part using Nessus and Metasploit’s autopwnage. I also think the video has some great funny moments as well, especially the Star Wars CVE effect. Either way let me know if you find it helpful or not. I don’t have the greatest bandwidth so be patient with the player as it may take a while to load. It’s also a large video, high resolution that is, so don’t forget to click the fullscreen icon on the bottom right of the player. The audio capture is low so you will probably need to jack up the volume.

So how do you manipulate a list of IP’s via the command line? Well there are several ways to go about this but I’ll present the way I went about it.

In my scenario I had a range of IP’s that I needed to extract/exclude out of a list of IP’s. This task needed to be done on a Windoze machine, I do most of my scripting on a Linux box, so I was trying to rely on the findstr command. Trying to use the findstr command to search, extract, or manipulate a list of IP’s will make you crazy. Now I’m sure there’s way smarter people out there that can craft a simple one line findstr command to hack and slash on an IP list but I’m not one of those people. I also tried to utilize some regular expression magic to manipulate an IP range. Google has this regular expression generator specifically for IP ranges, which seems neat at first but I couldn’t get it to work within findstr.

After no luck with findstr I was gonna turn to my old friend grep. Now for those that don’t know grep is a pattern / regular expression matching command within Linux. Grep has the ability to search for patterns within directories and files for a specific string (e.g. IP addresses). There is a grep Windows executable with basically the same functionality but it couldn’t handle Google’s regular expression either. After burning through two different programs to perform this task I was almost at a lost. My coworker reminded me of awk, how could I forget. Awk is a native program within Linux but you can download an exe version of the program. There are different flavors of awk (gawk and mawk) and different programmers that try and port over awk. I tried some awk.exe’s and some gawk.exe’s but I had the best success with mawk.exe, you can grab mawk.exe here. So enough yip yapping let’s walk through the solution. Below is a sample list of IP’s that we’ll hack and slash on, let’s assume these IP’s are in a file called IPlist.txt.

So let’s say we wanted to extract or exclude the range 192.168.0.5-192.168.0.15, you would use the mawk command below.

Let me explain the command above. BEGIN simply processes the text before mawk starts munching. FS stands for field separator, here we are telling mawk that our filed separator is period (surrounded by single quotes). The $3 is basically a variable calling the 3rd field, in our case it’s the third number in our IP address. The || means “or”. The == is to determine is something is equivalent. The && is “and”. The $4 is the 4th number in our IP address because it’s the 4th field. So the command reads like this: separator is a period, we want the 3rd number to be less than zero or greater than zero or equal to 3 and we want the 4th number to be less than 5 or greater than 15. The $0 represents the entire line so the print statement is just printing out the entire line that matches our criteria. Let’s look at a similar example, say we want to extract 192.168.5.10-18.

I’m sure there are probably other ways to go about performing the same task but this one works for me. Now feel free to go ahead and mawk it out.