I am trying to crack a number of passwords that have been hashed using SHA-256.
I have the hashes available and I also have the possibilities in which the password can be. Some of these possibilities include;
- a lower case English word
- a simple lower case name such as bob or alice.
- a combination of 4 alphanumerical values with special characters e.g ro@!, f6&h
So for example I have hash
9F86D081884C7D659A2FEAA0C55AD015A3BF4F1B2B0B822CD15D6C15B0F00A08
and I want to get the password using an algorithm (one which I will code in Java) to get the password:
test
I am asking to see where to start in how I can complete this task.
I first thought to calculate all the hashes for the password possibilities and cross-reference with the hashes given to me but this does not seem to be the right answer as it would take too long.
Is there any other way to go about cracking these passwords?