[cyberfox]

I'm getting more than 1M SHA1 + Hamming Distance calcs/core/sec on a Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz, and I haven't really optimized beyond the obvious.

It's a brutally simple algorithm, really. XOR + bitcount, which only iterates for each 1 bit, so the lower the total hamming #, the faster it finds it.

It's in C, so everything works in unsigned long blocks. Compiled with -O3 it's:

real 0m0.968s

for 1M each on two forked processes, and 80 lines of code.

[cyberfox]

Oooog. Boy is my face red. I was recalculating the main SHA1 each time through the loop. A minor refactoring mistake with a major impact...

With the base string hash pulled out of the loop, it's looking more like 1.7M SHA1 + HD calcs/core/sec.

[matta]

Yeah, mine's Perl, and running on a slower processor, so the difference feels about right.

Of course my main calculation is only one line:

$hamming_dist = unpack("%160b*", sha1($attempt_phrase) ^ $challenge_sha);

:)