phrasen|drescher - a passphrase cracker                     document version: 1.0
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  1 About
  2 Installation
  3 Run It!
  4 Troubleshooting



 1  About
 --------

    phrasen|drescher cracks passphrases of RSA or DSA keys as they would be used
    by ssh(1) for instance.

 2  Installation
 ---------------

    ./configure
    make
    make install

    The openssl library is required.

 3  Run It!
 ----------

    phrasen|drescher has to modes to run as. The Incremental mode does pure
    brute force of potential pass phrases while in Dictionary mode, phrases are
    taken from a word list:


      Incremental mode:

        phrasendrescher -i 6:8 key-file

        This mode expects an argument that gives the length of words to generate
        or a range. Generating 8 characters long words would be done by:

          phrasendrescher -i 8 key-file

        And to specify a range. E.g. from 8 characters to 12:
        
          phrasendrescher -i 8:12 key-file

        By default, phrasen|drescher uses all printable characters for generating
        the phrases. However, you can specify your own character map in an
        environment variable called `PHRASENDRESCHER_MAP'. For example, in order
        to only do lower case characters:

          export PHRASENDRESCHER_MAP="abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
          phrasendrescher -i 6:8 key-file

        The character map also implies the order of the characters to be used
        in phrases. So, if you want to do the increment in reverse order,
        simply do:

          export PHRASENDRESCHER_MAP="zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcba"
          phrasendrescher -i 6:8 key-file

     Dictionary mode:

       Using this mode is straight forward:

         phrasendrescher -d wordlist key-file


    phrasen|drescher can read and try multiple keys if you specify a directory
    instead of a single key file:

      phrasendrescher -d wordlist directory-containing-keys

 4  Troubleshooting
 ------------------

   If you encounter any bugs, not listed in this section, please refer to
   nico@leidecker.info.

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phrasen|drescher 1.0 - a passphrase cracker
Copyright (C) 2007 Nico Leidecker; nfl@portcullis-security.com
http://www.portcullis.co.uk - http://www.leidecker.info
