openwall / openwall/john

OpenSSL finds too many false postives

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RFC / discussion
Dominant language
C
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Description

OpenSSL hashs find too many false postives when running in John

However searching on Github I noticed:

https://github.com/glv2/bruteforce-salted-openssl
Solves false positive cases where decryption fails but password candidate is accepted as a solution for ignoring the result of EVP_DecryptUpdate.

The false positive issue was solved 8 months ago for this script:
https://github.com/glv2/bruteforce-salted-openssl/blob/master/src/bruteforce-salted-openssl.c

This programs also allows the option to define which cipher and digest to try.

I was hoping both of these could potentially be incorporated into John in a future update

Many Thanks

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating John's OpenSSL hash implementation and compare its decryption-result handling with the referenced bruteforce-salted-openssl source. Check how cipher and digest selection currently work, then define completion as eliminating false-positive candidates while preserving valid matches and supporting the requested options.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
c
Domain
cryptography, security
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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