That time I used Ruby to crack my Reddit password
summary
Locks a throwaway Reddit password into LetterMeLater then scrapes its search box behavior and builds a Ruby tool called lettermenow.rb using the Faraday gem and a captured cookie to query the site. Exploits a substring oracle: find a character not in the subject, extend forward and backward to recover the full 22‑char secret. The script runs 403 queries against the site (predicted ~432) and successfully retrieves the lost password.
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chapters (19)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:38Addiction to useless websites
- 0:54No selfcontrol
- 1:19Odysseus
- 1:34What I did
- 4:13Two years later
- 4:43Logging back in
- 5:43Searching for the password
- 6:55substring queries
- 7:35the algorithm
- 10:21thats doable
- 10:53building the API
- 15:04building the algorithm
- 17:17finding the first letter
- 18:33bill forward
- 19:54build backward
- 22:32build forward false
- 24:29build backwards
- 25:12conclusion
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