Spring 2024 Fall 2024 Prior Terms

This activity can be used to learn about permutations with repetition, exponents, and unit conversions.

This activity can be prepared as either an interactive activity or a pre-defined worksheet. Interactive components are asking students for password patterns and asking students to look up cracking speeds of GPU machines online.

If used in non-interactive mode, prepare password patterns and cracking speeds in the handout ahead of time. Here is a table of common password cracking rates:

GPU Power	MD5 Algorithm	SHA1 Algorithm	SHA256 Algorithm	SHA512 Algorithm	bcrypt Algorithm
1 low-end GPU	2.8 billion/sec	879 million/sec	337 million/sec	103 million/sec	n/a
1 mid-to-high-end GPU	6.2 billion/sec	2.4 billion/sec	1.2 billion/sec	90 million/sec	4.5 thousand/sec
1 high-end GPU	7.9 billion/sec	2.5 billion/sec	1 billion/sec	179 million/sec	n/a
8 high-end GPUs	93.8 billion/sec	29.5 billion/sec	12.3 billion/sec	2 billion/sec	n/a
25 mid-to-high-end GPUs	180 billion/sec	63 billion/sec	n/a	n/a	71 thousand/sec

Walk the students through several examples of how to determine the size of the password search space from the number of characters, patterns, and types of characters chosen (see Introduction, Ethics, Operational Security, Passwords for background information).

The important part of determining the search space is knowing the number of possible characters in each type of character set. The following are common character sets:

Type of charset	Number of Characters
Digits/Numbers	10
Lower-case Letters	26
Upper-case Letters	26
Symbols (e.g. # ! @ * % } = ? ,)	34
All 7-bit Characters	96

The size of the search space is the total number of possible combinations of characters in the character set, given a specific password length. Patterns can be uniform (same charset for each character in the password, e.g. all lower-case) or it can be mixed (1st three characters are digits, next three characters are lower-case). It is easier to begin the examples with uniform patterns.

For the examples, draw an empty box for each character in the password. Under the box, say what type of charset it is. Inside the box, write how many characters are in that charset. Then show the students how to calculate the number of permutations by multiplying the boxes together. If the pattern uses the same type for each character, this can also be used to show how permutations can be calculated by exponents.

Example 1: 8 lower-case characters

 ____     ____     ____     ____     ____     ____     ____     ____ 
|    |   |    |   |    |   |    |   |    |   |    |   |    |   |    |
| 26 | * | 26 | * | 26 | * | 26 | * | 26 | * | 26 | * | 26 | * | 26 |
|____|   |____|   |____|   |____|   |____|   |____|   |____|   |____|
Lower    Lower    Lower    Lower    Lower    Lower    Lower    Lower

26 * 26 * 26 * 26 * 26 * 26 * 26 * 26 = 26⁸

Example 2: 7 characters, either lower-case or digits/numbers

Now the number of characters for each "slot" will be 26 + 10 = 36.

 ____     ____     ____     ____     ____     ____     ____ 
|    |   |    |   |    |   |    |   |    |   |    |   |    |
| 36 | * | 36 | * | 36 | * | 36 | * | 36 | * | 36 | * | 36 |
|____|   |____|   |____|   |____|   |____|   |____|   |____|
LowerNum LowerNum LowerNum LowerNum LowerNum LowerNum LowerNum

36 * 36 * 36 * 36 * 36 * 36 * 36 = 36⁷

Example 3: 6 lower-case characters followed by 2 numbers/digits

 ____     ____     ____     ____     ____     ____     ____     ____ 
|    |   |    |   |    |   |    |   |    |   |    |   |    |   |    |
| 26 | * | 26 | * | 26 | * | 26 | * | 26 | * | 26 | * | 10 | * | 10 |
|____|   |____|   |____|   |____|   |____|   |____|   |____|   |____|
Lower    Lower    Lower    Lower    Lower    Lower    Number   Number

26 * 26 * 26 * 26 * 26 * 26 * 10 * 10 = 26⁶ * 10²

You can either pre-calculate the result or have students use calculators to calculate the results, depending on their level of mathematics preparation.

Take the size of the search space from the previous step and divide it by the cracking rate for one of the password algorithms (either have the students use the Internet to search for rates or give them the table at the top of this guide). This will give you maximum the number of seconds it takes to crack the password space. This calculation is an upper bound.

Note: If you give the students the above table, this exercise can also be used to show how to convert between billion, million, etc. The numbers can also be expressed in scientific notation to reinforce those lessons.

                        Size of the Search Space
Maximum Time to Crack = ------------------------
                         Password Cracking Rate

If the result is large, this exercise can also be used to teach time unit conversions, e.g. convert seconds into minutes, hours, days, years, etc. Either give students specific patterns or ask the students to create patterns on the fly. Have the students calculate the size of the search space and then calculate the time it would take to crack the passwords using one or more of the algorithms.

Comparing a fast algorithm (e.g. MD5) to a slow algorithm (e.g. bcrypt) can also be done during the activity.