Practicum in Trading Systems Development: Lab 7

Due:           Tuesday, November 26, 2013, by 5:00 PM

PURPOSE AND RATIONALE

This lab will require students to combine a number of the technologies discussed to date along with the freedom to more openly design a solution to solve a computationally complex yet easily parallelized problem.

NB:  If you are not a CSPP student and are in need of a CS Cluster login ID (if you don't know what this is you are in need of one), contact the TAs immediately so you can get set up with a cluster login ID for the labs.  This course cannot be conducted without a CS Cluster login ID.  If you already have a UofC CNET ID, you can (and should) manually apply for a CS cluster ID here.


PRIMARY RESOURCES:

You should refer to relevant sections of the man pages for assistance for this lab, in addition to materials in the assigned chapters from the primary texts for this week (per the syllabus).

You should ssh into the cluster to perform all lab activities.

Make sure you have read this week's assigned reading. 

README

  1. If you are not in our course email list, please subscribe to the cspp51025 email list here:  http://mailman.cs.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/cspp51025

  2. Turn the lab assignment as a tarball in by email to the TA (cc'ing the instructor) by the due date above.

  3. For printing out your documents, you might find the following commands useful during your year(s) in this department:

    1. lpr -  off line print. Note that this command is called when you print from acroread  (for .pdf files) or gv (for .ps files)
    2. lpq - shows the printer queue
    3. lprm - removes jobs from the printer queue
    4. enscript - converts text files to PostScript (useful when you want to print out text files)

  4. Make sure you have read the Submission Guidelines for submission.

LAB 7

In this lab we are going to crack passwords.  You have been given an MD5 hash of a 5 character password.  The valid characters used in this password are A-Z and 0-9.   Five characters thus yield just over 60 million possibilities.  We are going to use a brute force and ignorance approach to finding this password.  In other words, we are going to try all possibilities.  A main controller thread is responsible for distributing work to an arbitrary number of worker threads (this value will be declared on the command line).

You must have coordination among these worker threads so that collisions do not occur.  One suggested solution might be to use an STL queue to store the unused first two-letter combinations.  When a worker thread completes it's work, it simply pops the next range off the queue.  The program ends when the password you hashed results in a hash that matches the hash provided.

See Mark Weindling's lecture for the text of the MD5 hash.

More information:

Spencer's Socket Site
Beej's Guide to Network Programming
Developerweb Unix Socket FAQ
Richard Steven's Home Page
BOOST Sockets
 

Mark Shacklette