Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Challenger: A Tool for Breaking NETNTLM/MSCHAP Hashes


A few months ago I stumbled upon an excellent write-up explaining the details of NETNTLM (NTLMv1 Challenge Response) authentication. It's an interesting design, and two things jumped out at me right away: the use of a symmetric cipher (DES) rather than only hashing functions, and the odd way the hash is split into three, uneven, portions. This inspired me to work on increased attack speeds against NETNTLM. In the end, I created a small Python tool called Challenger that significantly accelerates dictionary-based attacks on NETNTLM challenge-response hashes.