README

eggbeater

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OVERVIEW
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This hack-week project attempts to use brute force to discover the Meebo session
key secret.  It takes the initial part of the session key (ip:port:salt), appends
a possible secret key, takes the SHA-1 hash, and compares the result to a hash
that is known to be good.

This is a lot of computation, so eggbeater offloads the secret key generation,
SHA-1 calculation, and verification to the GPU using PyCUDA.  On my system, with
a GeForce GTX 560 Ti, it's capable of checking about 100,000,000 secrets per second.

The Meebo secret key is 9 characters of lowercase alpha and digits.  Thus, a
brute-force crack needs to try 36^9 keys, which on my machine will take about 11 days.

Amazon EC2 offers GPU instances that come with 2 beefy GPUs each for about $2 an hour.
Pessimistically, these should each be able to check about 720,000,000,000 keys per hour.
Thus, for about $140, the Meebo session key could be brute forced in less than one hour.

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USE
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Requires PyCUDA, Numpy, and a decent NVIDIA GPU (with compute capability >= 2).
The top of the script has some tweakable parameters.  Run with:

    python eggbeater.py

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CAVEATS
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I threw this together hastily for hack week.  It's ugly and probably broken! ^_^