Whatever Crossed My Mind

Numerous breaches happen every day due to security vulnerabilities. On this blog, I have previously analyzed some of the biggest breaches that have been made public. All of them serve as a testament to the inadequate security many companies employ. The Time it Takes to Crack a Hash I often get asked: "How long does it take to crack an MD5 hash?" - implying that the cryptographic hash algorithm is the most important factor, which rarely is the case. It actually depends on a couple of factors, which I've ordered in descending importance below: The length of the password The charsets used in the password The amount of hardware you have The methodology you use for cracking Secure Passwords Password lengths alone are not enough, you also have to use a good charset to control the search space hackers have to go though. Let's make an example to show how much the search space changes: Charset = a-z, A-Z, 0-9 Length 6: (26+26+10)^6 = 56.800.235.584 Length 7: (...

As a technology ideologist, Network Address Translation (NAT) is one of my biggest concerns when it comes to the future of the Internet. The Internet was built as a communications tool to facilitate the sharing of information in digital form. It has vastly improved the communication between humans around the planet and it has been one of the most important inventions we have ever made. My concerns is with the fact that NAT is a direct inhibitor of the nature of the Internet, which goes against everything we want the Internet to be. Network Address Translation The Internet uses routers to route data from network to network, but to do so, we need addresses of each network. Today we use Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), which you usually see in dottet format such as 199.181.132.250. In its raw form, IPv4 is a 32 bit (4 bytes) addressing scheme which is able to address 2^32 (4.294.967.296) networks, which was enough back when the Internet was created in the 1950s, but it is nowhe...