As per the documentation on MySQL I moved the storage of passwords from using Password() to using MD5(). I read a number of places that stated that this was a method that couldn’t be reversed and it was far more secure than the previous method. I was feeling confident that life was about to get a little more secure. While going through my daily RSS feeds and mailing lists for SpikeSource, I happenned upon a thread about someone discussing how easy it was to break MD5 hashes. It was a simple matter of using a brute force algorithm to check all the different combinations.

Eager to try this out for myself, I did a quick Google and found a Project RainbowCrack which was a Windows/Linux utility that would brute force crack MD5 hashes amongst other secure algorithms. Thinking it would be shrouded in mathematical terms and phrases unfamiliar to me I didn’t hold out much hope that I could get it to do what I wanted; to take a sample of passwords that were stored in MySQL database tables using the MD5() function and crack them for me.

The project builds a number of lookup tables to make the whole process a lot quicker. This in all fairness only took about 18hours to complete on my dual processor 3GHZ machine. After the tables where built it was a simple matter of running a simple command line utility to crack the MD5 hash. Time taken? 1.26seconds! That’s how secure MySQL passwords encoded with MD5() are at this precise moment.

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