Hashtopia started out as a humble collection of notes that I started to build as I set out on my cybersecurity career path. My favorite part of any operation was always the late nights that I would spend with my team trying to crack passwords. There was something about working those problems into the early AM so that we could enable other areas of our operations that just felt 'Hollywood Hacker' cool to me. Plus, I live for the moment when a complex password breaks, it is like being a kid on Christmas morning every single time. The rush of cracking that hash was only part of it though for me, I started to ask myself 'what does this string tell me about this person?' That question right there pulled me deep into the Psychology of password creation (if there is such a thing) and I uncovered a new universe of information as I expanded my perspective to encompass not only the system but the human elements that could be predictably modeled with enough clues. Passwords encode far more than authentication secrets; they embed behavioral, cultural, and contextual clues derived from their creators. It was when I started following the clues and pairing that with computational power, I fell down this rabbit hole that I don't think that I will ever climb back out of again. Once you start to see the patterns, its impossible to unsee them. Password research exposes the mechanisms that we all use to protect our secrets, understanding the vast commonalities that exist when we are trying to be clever about password creation reveals a lot about how we think as humans, and the very real challenges that emerge when our limited capacity memory intersects with the seemingly endless scale of security that we encounter on a day to day basis. I hope that this resource proves as useful to you as it has been to me. -PeteTheHeat #sudad [[Home]]