Brute-force cracking SHA-512 passwords in unix password file

I have a school assignment which consists of me having to crack a unix password file, the passwords were created using SHA-512,

I'm using python3, to write my password cracking script, which goes through a password file, adds the salt and compares each password until the hash is found.

Here is my code:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import crypt
passFile = open('passwords.txt', 'r')

salt_MD5 = []
hash_MD5 = []
salt_SHA512 = []
hash_SHA512 = []
for line in passFile:
    if "$6$" in line:
        temp1 = line.split(":")
        temp1 = temp1[1]
        salt_SHA512.append(temp1[:11])
        hash_SHA512.append(temp1)
    if "$1$" in line:
        temp1 = line.split(":")
        temp1 = temp1[1]
        salt_MD5.append(temp1[:11])
        hash_MD5.append(temp1)

print(salt_MD5, hash_MD5)
print(salt_SHA512, hash_SHA512)


crackStation = open('1000000passwords.txt', 'r')

print("Searching for the password...")
counter = 0
for index in crackStation:
    counter += 1
    hashed_value_1 = crypt.crypt(index, salt_MD5[0])
    hashed_value_2 = crypt.crypt(index, salt_MD5[1])
    hashed_value512_1 = crypt.crypt(index, salt_SHA512[0])
    hashed_value512_2 = crypt.crypt(index, salt_SHA512[1])
    if counter % 50000 == 0:
        print("Counter is at: " + str(counter) + " Left to iterate = " + str(1000000-counter))
    # if hashed_value_1 == hash_MD5[0]:
    #   password_1 = index
    #   print("User one has been cracked password is: " + password_1)
    # if hashed_value_2 == hash_MD5[1]:
    #   password_2 = index
    #   print("User two has been cracked password is: " + password_2)
    if hashed_value512_1 == hash_SHA512[0]:
        password_3 = index
        print("User one has been cracked using password: " + password_3)
    if hashed_value512_2 == hash_SHA512[1]:
        password_4 = index
        print("User one has been cracked using password: " + password_4)

print("Search Complete.")

try:
    print(password_1, password_2, password_3, password_4)
except Exception as e:
    print("Oh shit something went wrong :s" + e)

Please disregard the MD5, salt and hash, as that I will deal with later (professor claimed that some of the passwords in the file would be crackable and a fellow student confirmed that he was able to crack both the SHA-512 passwords therefore I commented the MD5 out for the sake of speed)

I'm curious to see WHAT type of encoding I should be using to read from the password file, So far I've tried 'mac_roman', to iterate through the dictionary file, and now I just didn't set an encoding, I'm assuming the default should be UTF-8, but I honestly don't know how to check to confirm.

If anyone has any suggestions on what I can do to get this working I'd really appreciate it!

(I'm attempting the default encoding right now, by not initializing one

crackStation = open('1000000passwords.txt', 'r')

)

If in the case that, that does in fact work I will let you know!

Additonal question:

Could someone tell me what the encoding would be for this password file,

adamkaplan:$6$S4Y0gQuy$QRkLo5t/6KONMAiQY9DIAPojv0Q8CBvDtNqe02sfR7rnEdw.QgSm0LU/JRcIc/Arn/PpK3lxroc19bVQDwUGQ/:17786:0:99999:7:::
cardib:$6$t84.Fvbo$8lKHpxBDnjoHhnFS3.A4ezNZmKfy5MLbe7UGZoOnWgz55j0g5TBx5LOQAujDiqkUuE50EACOZsydlBZgy5jkw/:17786:0:99999:7:::

the password hash isn't BASE64, and the reason I'm asking is because when I use different encodings within a dictionary file each encoding gives a different hash, so that's what is throwing me off, the fact that if I use UTF-8, I will receive a different hash verses latin-1

So what encoding would linux password file be using by default.

If I create a new linux account through the terminal and set a password and go back inside my password file I will have a newly made hash for that new usernames password, and the encoding that was used within that hashing algorithm is what I Would need, or atleast that's what I image would need in order to crack the password.

Hope that isn't too confusing :s

The solution that worked out for me, the reason I wasn't able to crack the passwords were because I failed to strip the new lines from the dictionary words,

simply doing a

line = line.rstrip()

solved my problem, I didn't need to do any type of encoding or anything to have the file work.