This is a slightly idle Bank Holiday question that I do not seem able to find a simple answer for.
Cracking passwords by brute force means testing every possible password, which in a recent question was thought to be over 900 years at 5 million tests a second.
5 million tests a second sounds a lot (even allowing for writing code in assembler and may be using graphics cards for some of the calculations). Therefore the test must be fairly simple, and I presume only working on a very short buffer.
Can someone point me in the correct direction for understanding these tests, (any relevant URLs) and how does the test know that the answer is correct - assuming no plain text example.
Does a cracking program for AES-256 work very differently in WinZip, WinRAR, maybe PDF files, or is the principle the same for all program types.
A source code example would suit me best