Challenges with Evaluating Password Cracking Algorithms
"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice they are not" -Quote from somebody on the internet. Also attributed to Albert Einstein but I've never been able to find the original source to back that up. Back-story: Currently I'm writing a post looking into Hashcat's Markov mode but I found myself starting off by including several paragraphs worth of disclosures and caveats. Or to put it another way: It was a valid point Jeremi brought up and it's something I'm trying to avoid. After thinking about it for a bit I figured this topic was worth its own post. Precision vs Recall: Part of the challenge I'm dealing with is I'm performing experiments vs writing tutorials. That's not to say I won't write tutorials in the future but designing and running tests to evaluate algorithms is fun and what I'm interested in right now. Why this can be a problem though is that I can get so deep into how an algorithm works tha...