title: Estimating Password Cracking Times
body: <p>So I have been looking into password cracking recently. I stumbled across several websites that claim to tell you roughly how long it would take for your password to be cracked.</p>
  
  <p>Really, I was wondering how they calculate this. </p>
  
  <p>From what I understand the possible combinations of a password is the pool size ^ password length.
  E.g a 5 letter password with upper and lower case letters would be 52^5 = 380204032 possible combinations and on average, assuming only brute-force methods are being used only 50% of these combinations would need to be checked before the password would be cracked.</p>
  
  <p>So how then can a website estimate the time to be cracked? Surely it is dependent on the hashing algorithms being used, processing power, etc or do they just make assumptions for number of guesses per second?</p>
  
  <p>I was wondering whether there is a definitive/standard way to estimate password cracking times and if so, how is it calculated.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>