Hashcat popular password recovery tool, is being billed as the world’s fastest password-cracking software. Today, it is already open source.
The announcement was first made ?? on 4 December on Twitter through an MD5 hash saying “HashCat open source” when “broken.” Jens ‘atom’ Steube, lead developer of Hashcat, later said in a post on the official forum, that the source code Hashcat based on the CPU tool, and the oclHashcat version, based on the GPU, were released under the MIT license.
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One big fan of open-source software, HashCat explained that it would take this step for some time. One reason for doing this is to allow pentesters and forensic scientists could add and modify the algorithms without exposing any potentially confidential information. Now that the tools have open source, users also will be able to integrate external libraries easily.
Hashcat Tool is Made Available Under Open Source License
So far, the oclHashcat supports graphics processors OpenCL (AMD) and CUDA (Nvidia) on Linux and Windows operating systems. The OS X is not supported because Apple does not allow the compilation “offline” the kernel code (the core operating system). Now that is the project is open source, users can compile the GPU kernel and use the oclHashcat on OS X.
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The fact that the password cracking tools have been released as open source under the MIT license which will also allow to integrate the most popular Linux distributions. Steube says he has planned to generate packages for Kali Linux, a Linux distro very popular among Pentesters.
Kaspersky Lab, whose experts were assisted by Steube to break the hashes related to malware and Gauss Equation Group, published a post on his blog on Monday, day 7/12, which explained the benefits of passwords breaks when tools have your open source. “The group of users who use most password cracking tools are pentesters. Your job is to assess security in certain areas, including the assessment of password security. Forensic experts also use these tools in order to have access to necessary evidence. In such cases, jobs are sensitive in many cases and apply strict rules, “said Marco Preuss, Kaspersky.
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Also Said, “Open source software offers the possibility of developing custom extensions without leaking any potentially sensitive information to developers of such tools. This applies to different hash algorithms that are required to be audited, while the pentesting or specific requirements are defined in forensic cases, such as the collection of criminal evidence for future judicial action “.
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Steube stressed that release of the Hashcat source code does not mean that he is leaving the project. “No way I would do it! I will continue here with the same claw always, “said the developer. The source code Hashcat and oclHashcat is available GitHub. Bug fixes and new features may be submitted, but contributors must ensure that your code conforms to a specific set of requirements.
