Thursday, 10 December 2015
The world’s fastest cracking tool Hashcat is now open source. The company has called it a very important step and listed out the reasons that inspired them to take this step.
If you are into password cracking, you might be aware of the fact that Hashcat is one of the most popular CPU-password recovery tools that is available for free. Hashcat is known for its speed and versatile nature to crack multiple types of hashes.
Now, going one step ahead, Hashcat has taken an important step of making Hashcat and oclHashcat open source. Hashcat is a CPU-based password recovery tool and oclHashcat is a GPU-accelerated tool.
In its latest blog post, Hashcat mentions the reasons behind this step. Whenever any software decides to go open source, the license matters the most. Hashcat used the MIT license, that allowed an easy integration or packaging of the common Linux distros, along with packages for Kali Linux.
Due to the adoption of open source path, now it’ll be easier to integrate external libraries in Hashcat. At the moment, hashcat/oclHashcat doesn’t need any external libraries, but if the need arises, now you’ve got the option.
Mentioning another major improvement, Hashcat writes that before going open source, there was no native support for OS X as Apple doesn’t support “offline” compiling of the kernel code. With open source license, now you can easily compile the kernels using Apple OpenCL Runtime JIT.
According to the company, another inspiration for going open source was the implementation of bitsliced DES GPU kernels.
Hashcat offers multiple types of attack modes. Take a look:
- Brute-Force attack
- Combinator attack
- Dictionary attack
- Fingerprint attack
- Hybrid attack
- Mask attack
- Permutation attack
- Rule-based attack
- Table-Lookup attack
- Toggle-Case attack
- PRINCE attack
