Bugtraq mailing list archives
John the Ripper v1.4
From: solar () IDEAL RU (solar () IDEAL RU)
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 1997 23:21:03 -0500
I'd like to announce the release of version 1.4 of my UNIX password cracker, John the Ripper. It is currently available for UNIX (tested with Linux x86, FreeBSD x86, Solaris 2.x SPARC, OSF/1 Alpha), DOS, WinNT/Win95. New since version 1.3: - MD5 based password files support; - SPARC V8 assembly version; - a lot of bugfixes. You may wonder, why design one more password cracker, when we already have Crack? Well, when I started working on John, Crack v4.1 was a bit outdated, and I didn't know Crack v5.0 was going to be released. Actually, Crack v5.0 doesn't have much features added since v4.1, it is still lacking a cracking mode John had from the very beginning -- trying all the possible character combinations _in_a_reasonable_order_, using character frequencies based on other real passwords. Crack7 supplied with Crack v5.0 is unlikely to crack a password of 6 or more characters long (it's even supplied with these lines commented out), while John is often able to crack non-word-based 8 character passwords with this mode when running on a single CPU for a day or even less. The encryption routines are also optimized (both the algorithm and the code), and are faster than fcrypt() of libdes supplied with Crack v5.0. However, I must admit that Crack has some features that John doesn't (for example, the network management), and that I used some ideas from Crack and other password crackers while developing John (for example, the wordlist rules syntax). It is not like a competition (who makes the best password cracker), but just an attempt to do some improvements. Finally, John the Ripper v1.4 can be downloaded at: http://www.false.com/security/john/ Signed, Solar Designer
Current thread:
- John the Ripper v1.4 solar () IDEAL RU (Mar 04)