John the Ripper is a fast password cracker, currently available for many flavors of Unix, Windows, DOS, BeOS, and OpenVMS. Its primary purpose is to detect weak Unix passwords. Besides several crypt(3) password hash types most commonly found on various Unix systems, supported out of the box are Windows LM hashes, plus lots of other hashes and ciphers in the community-enhanced version.
John the Ripper is free and Open Source software, distributed primarily in source code form. If you would rather use a commercial product tailored for your specific operating system, please consider John the Ripper Pro, which is distributed primarily in the form of "native" packages for the target operating systems and in general is meant to be easier to install and use while delivering optimal performance.
Changelog v1.8.0
- Revised the incremental mode to let the current character counts grow for each character position independently, with the aim to improve efficiency in terms of successful guesses per candidate passwords tested.
- Revised the pre-defined incremental modes, as well as external mode filters that are used to generate .chr files.
- Added makechr, a script to (re-)generate .chr files.
- Enhanced the status reporting to include four distinct speed metrics (g/s, p/s, c/s, and C/s).
- Added the “–fork=N” and “–node=MIN[-MAX]/TOTAL” options for trivial parallel and distributed processing.
- In the external mode compiler, treat character literals as unsigned.
- Renamed many of the formats.
- Updated the documentation.
- Relaxed the license for many source files to cut-down BSD.
- Relaxed the license for John the Ripper as a whole from GPLv2 (exact version) to GPLv2 or newer with optional OpenSSL and unRAR exceptions.
- Assorted other changes have been made.
