A novel time-memory trade-off method for password recovery

Abstract

As users become increasingly aware of the need to adopt strong password, it hinders the digital forensics investigations due to the password protection of potential evidence data. In this paper, we analyse and discuss existing password recovery methods, and identify the need for a more efficient and effective method to aid the digital forensics investigation process. We show that our new time-memory trade-off method is able to achieve up to a 50% reduction in terms of the storage requirement in comparison to the well-known rainbow table method while maintaining the same success rate. Even when taking into consideration the effect of collisions, we are able to demonstrate a significant increase (e.g. 13.28% to 19.14%, or up to 100% based on considering total plaintext–hash pairs generation) in terms of the success rate of recovery if the storage requirement and the computational complexity are to remain the same.