Performance Hacking - how to hack your tools to go faster - singe | BSides Cape Town 2023
Channel: BSides Cape Town
Date: 2023-12-20

Rust, hacking, and password cracking - how I built a password cracker faster than hashcat on CPU, but also a large file reading approach faster than ripgrep.

Rust, hacking and password cracking. All things I love dearly. But when an obsessive hacker wants to crack passwords efficiently, sometimes you can reach speeds faster than hashcat can produce on CPU! Efficient hash cracking is about performance, and performance is about understanding computers.

The most common approach for more speed is to just throw more hardware at the problem, but in this talk, motivated by getting a new laptop with a new architecture, I will show how similar, if not better password cracking speeds can be achieved with just a little computer science.

I'll discuss the many problems I had in my goal and the many interesting performance related lessons I learnt which ultimately resulted in me discovering a new way to dramatically speedup file reads on multicore systems.