(June 26, 2016 at 2:09 pm)Tiberius Wrote:(June 26, 2016 at 1:29 pm)Jehanne Wrote: They used a brute force method to get his password. As I said above, it has been revealed that the NSA can try a trillion guesses per second. If my password is "Apollo", it wont' take long for someone to crack that using offline methods.
The problem with that NSA figure is its not quantified. What hashing algorithm is that number based on? Generating a SHA1 hash is much quicker than generating a SHA3 hash for instance, and that's not even accounting for the number of iterations. The FileVault key is generated from 250,000 iterations of a SHA1 based algorithm. For each guess, you have to run SHA1 250,000 times. That massively increases the time it takes to crack the hash.
I assume that they are running a dictionary attack with as many "common variants" as possible.
