Is your Windows password safe?

BANGALORE: Philippe Oechslin , of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology has released a paper that demonstrates how easy it is to crack Windows passwords composed only of alphanumeric characters. Using this technique, another pair of researchers have posted a Windows NT password crackerto a website.

These researchers write that Windows passwords are easier to crack because "The two ways of encrypting passwords on windows systems, the LanManager hash and the NThash, both lack the use of random information. The hash of a given password will thus be the same on any machine running Windows . Unix is not like this, it adds a random value to every calculation".

This method is based on a concept called the 'time-memory trade off.’ According to his paper, he could crack 99.9 percent of all alphanumeric Windows passwords in 13.6 seconds.

Boasting a 6,000-time speed improvement over brute force password cracking, and able to crack a password 32 times faster than older methods, the NT password cracker can bust any alphanumeric Windows password in an average of five seconds, said the researchers

For now, the researchers have not released the code of this Windows NT password cracker.