7MS #399: Baby's First Password Cracking Rig

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Believe it or not I'm pentesting your stuff
I never thought I could feel so free-hee-hee
I compromised one of your Domain Admins
Who it could be? The guy with "Password123"

In today's episode we're talking all about building your own password-cracking rig! "Wait a minute!" you say. "Are you abandoning the Paperspace password cracking in the cloud thing?" Nope! I'm just bringing that methodology "in house" for a little better opsec and also because last year on Paperspace I spent thousands of dollars.

First things first - here's the hardware I ended up with:

• Inland Premium 512GB SSD 3D NAND M.2 2280 PCIe NVMe 3.0 x4 Internal Solid State Drive
• Intel Core i5-9400F Desktop Processor 6 Core up to 4.1GHz Without Processor Graphics LGA1151 - Intel 300 Series chipset
• ASUS ROG Strix Z390-H Gaming LGA 1151 ATX Intel Motherboard
• EVGA SuperNOVA 1200P2 1200 Watt 80 Plus Platinum Modular Power Supply
• Corsair Graphite 760T ATX Full-Tower Computer Case
• G.Skill Ripjaws V 16GB 2 x 8GB DDR4-3200 PC4-25600 CL16 Dual Channel Desktop Memory Kit F4-3200C16D-16GVKB
• EVGA GeForce RTX NVLINK SLI Bridge - 4 Slot Spacing
• Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Universal CPU Cooler
• 2x - EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FTW3 Ultra Gaming Triple-Fan 11GB GDDR6 PCIe 3.0 Video Card

From there, I built a basic Ubuntu server box as follows:

• Download the Ubuntu mini.iso

I made a 100gig EFI partition, 100 gig EXT4 and then marked the rest of the disk space as not used

Once Ubuntu is installed, I did a bunch of the following command line stuff to get the not used partition encrypted:

sudo apt install cryptsetup

fdisk -l (to list partitions)

cryptsetup -y -v luksFormat /dev/nvme0n1p3 (replace this name with the free space one)

Create a mapping with:

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/nvme0n1p3 hashtopia

Check status:

ls -l /dev/nvme0n1p3

Format the partition

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mapper/hashtopia status=progress

Now format it as ext4 and mount it:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/hashtopia
mkdir /cryptkeeper
mount /dev/mapper/hashtopia /cryptkeeper

For future mounts (after a reboot), do:

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/nvme0n1p3 hashtopia
mount /dev/mapper/hashtopia /cryptkeeper

Now you can follow the gist I wrote to get the drivers installed and start crackin'!!!