Eggdrop IRC Bot Hash

What is Eggdrop IRC Bot?

The Eggdrop IRC bot hash format is a legacy password storage scheme introduced in the mid-1990s to secure bot operator credentials within the open-source IRC bot software, Eggdrop. This algorithm was designed as a lightweight alternative to stronger cryptographic hashes of the era, leveraging a custom iterative hashing process that combines MD5 with a proprietary salted iteration mechanism. The structure consists of a 32-character hexadecimal string derived from the concatenation of a user-provided password, a fixed 8-character salt (derived from the bot’s configuration), and a variable number of iterations (typically 1000 by default). The primary use-case was to authenticate bot operators via a simple `hash(password + salt)` comparison, though it lacked formal cryptographic rigor, relying instead on obscurity and computational overhead to deter brute-force attacks. Over time, the format became widely adopted in IRC bot communities due to its simplicity and compatibility with legacy systems, despite its known vulnerabilities.

The Eggdrop hash format is highly vulnerable to cracking due to its inherent design flaws and computational inefficiencies. The absence of a per-user salt (instead using a fixed salt per bot) reduces entropy, enabling precomputation attacks like rainbow tables. The iterative MD5-based process, while intended to slow brute-force attempts, is easily parallelized across modern GPUs using optimized tools like Hashcat or John the Ripper, as MD5’s fixed block size and linear iteration structure allow for high-throughput cracking. Additionally, the format suffers from collision susceptibility due to MD5’s inherent weaknesses, and the lack of a key stretch mechanism (e.g., no adaptive iteration count based on password strength) renders it susceptible to GPU-accelerated dictionary attacks. The fixed iteration count (often 1000) was designed to deter early CPU-based brute-forcing but is now trivial to overcome with modern hardware, making the format effectively broken for secure password storage.

Identifying Eggdrop IRC Bot Hashes

Identifying a hash blindly is often difficult because multiple algorithms can output strings of the exact same length. For example, a standard 32-character hexadecimal string could be MD5, NTLM, MD4, or LM. To definitively identify Eggdrop IRC Bot, security researchers analyze the hash against a strict regular expression (regex) signature (shown above) to find structural matches.

How to Crack Eggdrop IRC Bot

If you need to recover the plaintext password for a Eggdrop IRC Bot hash during a penetration test or forensics investigation, you must supply the correct module ID to your cracking software. Use the exact commands provided at the top of this page to target the hash successfully.