Today, one of my trainees asked me a question. When he created a wordlist for password cracking, he created a wordlist with 8 characters, and it was only 850MB. When I created a wordlist with 11 words, the file size was about 1TB. Is it possible? Maybe I'm missing something
Now, I'll explain about that. I'll use Mathematics concepts.
To calculate the number of possible combinations for an 11-character password using uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters, we can use the formula for permutations where repetition is allowed:
Possible Combination = Nk
- ( N ) is the total number of possible characters (uppercase + lowercase + numbers + special characters).
- ( k ) is the length of the password (in this case, 11).
Assuming:
- 26 uppercase letters
- 26 lowercase letters
- 10 digits (0-9)
- 32 common special characters (based on the standard ASCII printable characters)
The total number of characters ( N ) would be ( 26 + 26 + 10 + 32 = 94 ).
So, the total number of combinations for an 11-character password would be:
Total Words (Output) = Nk
Total Words (Output) = 9411
Total Words (Output) = 452,592,555,601,246,976
This means our wordlist would contain **452,592,555,601,246,976 possible 11-character passwords** using all characters with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters.
Assuming each character requires 1 byte of storage (which is typical for ASCII characters), the size of each password would be 11 bytes.
Since 1GB = 230bytes, the storage required for all those possible 11-character passwords would be approximately 4,210 gigabytes or 4.31 terabytes!
That is why i do not use custom (full) wordlists to crack passwords.
Thank you for reading
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