TL;DR

What's that? CrackMeIfYouCan on DEFCON is one of the most popular hash cracking contests in the wild. Best teams in the world compete on a 48h challenge to crack as many hashes as possible. The are 2 classes of competitiors - Pro and Street. We played under AlphaPwners team, and finished on 5th place. Last year, we got the 4th position.

Congratulations to Goolickers, Crevasse, VivaLaFaRT and StrongWind! GG!

0 - The setup

We were cracking the contest hashes using hashcat and it's distributed brother - hashtopolis. Few file-hashes were also cracked by john.

Our setup included:

2x RTX5000 @ Paperspace
1x RTX3090
2x K80 @ Azure
1x RTX3080
1x RTX3080Ti Mobile
1x RX5600 Mobile
1x RTX3050 Mobile
1x GTX960
1x GTX1660Ti
1x GTX1050Ti
1x GTX750Ti

1 - Get the hashes

All of the hash sets this year (except yescrypt) were cheap, fast, unsalted (or fixed-salt) hash types; the primary challenge wasn't cracking the password hashes, it was cracking the encrypted containers bundling them up in order to get to the hashes.
https://contest-2022.korelogic.com/stats-hashsets.html

If you've ever been on a pentest and harvested dozens of PASSWORDS.XLS and AccountInfo.zip off of users desktops, you know the value of cracking a variety of encrypted artifacts in a hurry. Various encrypted container file types were used, each containing hashes using a different weak cipher, of plaintexts that used one or more unique combination of source material (wordlist) and mutation rule(s).
https://contest-2022.korelogic.com/stats-hashsets.html

Grab the hashes to crack

Each class of competitors got a different set of encrypted files. Cracking the password to the file revealed hundreds of hashes to crack for contect points. The encrypted files on Street category were: 7z, gocryptfs, rar, zip, KeePass, soffice, PDF, zip and gpg.

The table below showes the hashes type to crack

Bundle	List	Hash Type	Points Each	Count	Total Points	Cracked
7z	list20	raw-sha384	46	10004	460184	~92%
gocryptfs	list13	raw-sha512	43	2803	120529	~55%
rar	list14	mysqlna	17	4214	71638	~91,5%
zip	list19	raw-sha256	13	4997	64961	~30%
KeePass	list11	mssql05	9	10812	97308	~80%
soffice	list18	raw-sha1	5	5455	27275	~80%
PDF	list24	nsldaps	5	2000	10000	100%
zip2	list16	half-md5	3	2766	8298	~64%
GPG	list17	raw-md5	1	2933	2933	~78%

The files were cracked using hashcat and john. First, the hash to crack was extracted using proper _2john tool such as rar2john or zip2john and then passed to hashcat or john.

The hashes were cracked using standard dictionaries like rockyou or password.lst and/or using the filename as password hint. Example: the filename 1991whattimeisit refered to a What Time Is It? song by Spin Doctors from 1991 and the password (answer) was directly in the lyrics - Four-thirty. Other password were connected to Wargames, Hackers and Swordfish movies, books and internet articles. The hints were also useful to determine on which resource a hashlist inside was based on.

2 - Let's get the party started

When you get over 40000 hashes to crack, you have to start somewhere. Our classic start while working on new hashlist is to use a few popular, mostly small dictionaries with popular ruleset + some small bruteforces. This technique doesen't win the contest of course, but it helps you figure out what's going on.

We start with simple supertask within hashtopolis to check our hashlists with wordlist..

And supertask end with very intersting results:

Only cracked passwords came from 2 dictionaries - hashes2019org.7z and rockyou.txt.gz

The classic start dictionaries were:

rockyou.txt
rockyou2021.7z
weakpass_3
Top1pt6M and Top2Billion form Probable Wordlists
facebook-firstnames.dic.gz
facebook-lastnames.dic.gz
final-en-wikipedia.dic.gz
JOHN.dict.KeyboardCombinations.txt
Crackstation dictionaries
zxcvbn.txt
hashesorg2019
passphrases.txt
packetstorm.txt (combine)

And the rules were:

OneRuleToRuleTheAll
T0XICv1
pantagrule.private.v5.popular
pantagrule.private.v5.hybrid    
pantagrule.private.v5.one
ProbWL-547-rule-probable-v2.rule
dive.rule
passphrase-rule1.rule
passphrase-rule2.rule
squid1m.rule

and one more thing. The english dictionary. This method is described below, as Tip #0.

Movies:

RAW-MD5 - Wargames movie

After classic start it was already obvious, that the hashlist was based on Wargames movie script. The title and file hint were also reffering to this movie. Using Wargame movie script as ditctionary + some rules and tricks (more below) 2278 hashes were easily cracked. We did not further invesigate this hashlist, because of low value (only 1p per hash).

HALF-MD5 - Hackers movie

Case similar to RAW-MD5, however we realized that this could be based on some movie very late. Most of the cracks were using hashesorg2019 and rockyou + Tip#1 (below).

RAW-SHA256 - Swordfish movie

We didn't realize that this hashlist was based on Swordfish movie, despite the file hint and cracked passwords. Probably this was the mistake that pushed us to 5th position. Many hases were cracked using classic start and appending number 22 at the end.

Books:

MSSQL05 - The Cuckoo's Egg book

Case again similar to RAW-MD5 - when classic start cracked a NSAHoncho password, a quick google search revealed a book on google books - https://books.google.com/books?id=9B1RfCAar2cC . Then, the case was similar: downlaod the book, make a dictionary, win. Next, please.

MYSQLNA - The Shockwave Rider book

Almost same thing as MSSQL05 - however the password, that got us to google books was something related with word Freeman. Tip#2 was very useful here.

Other:

NSLDAPS - Leaked passwords

This was even easier - classic start revealed that these were some leaked password with 2022 added at the end. Quick rule, and 100% cracks were here under 15 minutes.

RAW-SHA1 - ????

We don't know what happened here.

RAW-SHA384 and RAW-SHA512

After the competition we got a hint that, this hashlists were related to the article https://gizmodo.com/stop-the-steal-hacker-homecoming-queen-charged-as-ad-1846822348 (which btw, helped us with the file password - oh irony) and https://github.com/jbarke/textfiles.com/blob/master/textfiles.com/groups/CDC/cdcindex.txt We didn't realize it back then, but we cracked many hashes anyway.

SHA-384 had only a few password-formats. Knowing the base-word, hundeds of hashes were easily cracked using a mask of ?a?a?aBASE_WORD_HERE?1?1?d?d?d?d?d?d where ?1 was a digit, and !or a @ sign. Most of the times it was a word plus one, two or zero ! and @ signs plus few numbers at the end. Tip #0 helped us a lot here.

SHA-512 was cracked mostly with using the Tip #0 with english words + rockyou and using some leet rules.

Tips & Tricks

Tip #0 - The best password-cracking dictionary for this year contest? The english dictionary. Download english ditionaries from the web, combine them, remove duplicates. Make copies, where all words are uppercase, and capital case. Combine into one dictionary. The use can use it with rules, and in 1 hashcat combinator mode, combining many words with each other. You can make advanced versions, where each word is prepended with number or make a dictionary which consists od 2 english words combined - with different casing and special chars appended/prepended/between. When cracking passphrases - works like charm.

Tip #1 - Leave your weakest machine running in an infinite already cracked-cracking loop. Write a bash script, that will dump already cracked passwords and pass them as a wordlist input in hashcat. Then, add some popular rules (probably OneRuleToRuleThemAll), some auto-generated ones with -g 1000000 and try to append and prepend the -i ?a?a?a mask before and after the cracked hash with hashcat modes 6 and 7. If there are some similar passwords to these, that you have already cracked - you got this.

Tip #2 - Look at passphrase cracking techniques here - https://github.com/initstring/passphrase-wordlist