Cracking pdf file with arabic password using hashcat I have been doing some test on password strength using arabic passwords and try to crack it using hashcat and when i used a non salted hash like a custom generated md5 hash and tried using --hex-charset parameter and it works like a charm but when i try it on pdf files it is not working i even decreased the password to 1 character

in case you are wondering:


i followed this blog http://blog.bitcrack.net/2013/09/cracking-hashes-with-other-language.html but works only for non salted hashes.
i used pdf2jhon.py to extract the hashes.
yes using the above steps it can also work for english.
--hex-salt is not supported on 10500(pdf format)


My assumptions are:

1.maybe the pseudo random salt generator takes chars from the password itself 

2.the password hashing algorithm stores the password in unknown charset format when the password is from non-English chars

So my question is:

1.is there another workaround on this(is it possible)?

2.if my 2nd guess is correct please tell me what unicode?

UPDATE
after researching i found the problem is the tool used to encrypt the file uses non ASCI characters when using non ASCI characters in my case arabic i am trying to use utf-8 format like D985 can someone tell me which unicode microsoft office and adobe acrobat use when using non ASCI characters.
If you cannot get things to work with the application you can try and use the source code instead. A lot of these tools are open source. Then you can specify the character set directly and/or use an Arabic dictionary.

The password itself is not stored when a password is hashed. That means that the precise encoding details are lost - the password hashing algorithms themselves process bytes, not characters usually. Nowadays a lot of password hashes and applications default to UTF-8 though, which can encode any character set. UTF-16 and UTF-16LE can also be tried, with and without BOM header.

However, to find out which character set is used just from the hash (instead of, say, a protocol specification) you can only try.