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What is CrackQuest? CrackQuest is the Then it becomes a game. A nerdy game, to be sure. Crack as many of these SHA-1 hashes as you can. You'll need to resort to dictionary attacks at first, but once you've cracked the easy ones, and if you're in the know, you might be able to recognize some patterns. You might be able to spot some of the categories in the jumble of words because some of the words will be closely related to each other. The more hashes you crack, the more clues you have to work with. Once you figure out a category, you can use this knowledge to work on the other words belonging to that category by assembling new, targetted word lists. Can you give me an example? Yes, I can! What if your preliminary cracking efforts turned up the following words: orange apple eraser mango pencil garfield pear What categories do you see? Fruit, for sure. School supplies? Sounds likely. What about "garfield"? Is this the comic or the president? Looks like you'd better put both theories to the test! Do the "words" follow any format rules? Yes. I will only user lowercase letters and numbers. No symbols or whitespace or anything else. However, some of the words might be two or three (a slight chance of four; a much slighter chance of more) words slammed together with no spaces between them. These are intended to be the more difficult words that you'll only be able to crack through informed, targeted word lists based on the categories you identify. But still, the "words" will ONLY contain lowercase letters and numbers. No accents or umlauts or any of that stuff, either. Just pure all-American, uncultured, trailer-trash letters and numbers. Any punctuation, such as periods and apostrophes, will be removed. Ampersands will be converted to the word "and". Numbers, however, may be spelled out or not depending on the original form of the phrase. "Mr. Smith" becomes "mrsmith". And, not to get caught up in the Hollywood gossip, "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" becomes "mrandmrssmith". I think that's all you need to know. How do I get started? I was hoping you'd know that. If nobody can figure out how to get started, I'll try to make some sort of tutorial. But if you don't have the motivation to figure it out on your own, this game probably won't hold your interest. How do I know I'm computing these SHA-1 hashes correctly? The word "imuncertain" (without quotes) should produce the following SHA-1 hash: d37510868a267cc0d4b11245535b3dd427727198 If you're getting something different, make sure whatever you're using isn't inserting a newline character at the end of the word. For example, in Linux, if you're echo'ing the word and piping it to sha1sum, make sure to use echo's "-n" option to exclude the newline: % echo -n "imuncertain" | sha1sum d37510868a267cc0d4b11245535b3dd427727198 - Why is this website so ugly? Web design is not my forte. I worked out all the scripting while blissfully neglecting any notion of a "layout", then I threw dashed boxes around everything and called it a night. Why is there no "Log Out" page? Because I'm lazy and the only thing anybody could do if they got into your account is give you more points. They can't see the words for the hashes you've successfully cracked. Will there be more to this FAQ? Hopefully. First, I need to find out if this idea will be a total failure or not. If it's not a total failure, there will certainly be more rounds with all new hashes, as well. Bookmark this page! How can I contact you? ultramuffin at yahoo dot com |