From: Ben Holiday <ncognito@gate.net>
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 10:22:01 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Word lists for passphrases
In-Reply-To: <199607081635.MAA10394@jekyll.piermont.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.A32.3.93.960708174618.18872A-100000@navajo.gate.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


On Mon, 8 Jul 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> If you generate every possible word, you aren't getting any advantage
> by using crack and not just trying every possibility in your cracker

I'm not sure if anyone actually still cares about getting wordlists, if
not you can delete this now.. :) Someone probably mentioned this anyway,
but just in case.. 

If you have access to a shell, and to the news spool, you can generate
some quick lists by hopping into the directory of any newsgroup that
interests you and doing:

cat * | tr -cs A-Za-z '\n' | tr A-Z a-z | sort | uniq > my-big-ol-wordlist

With most unixes that will generate an alphabetized list of all the unique
words in your source text, converted to lowercase. I've had some problems
with tr on a few machines, however. Adding a '-c' after 'uniq' will tell
you how many times each word occured (useful for grepping out words that
appear too infrequently, or too frequently) .. 

Incidentally, if you're running crack against a particular person it might
be useful to check dejanews for posts by the individual, and generate your
wordlists from that, I havn't had occasion to actually try this but it
seems like a good idea. 

--nc