In the last week Openwall revamped the website (replacing the navigation menu and adding a logo) and now released an updated version of John the Ripper, a Open Source password-cracking for security auditing which supports Unix, Windows, DOS, BeOS, OpenVMS and also used and recommended combined with Aircrack-ng Suite for the creation/mangle the wordlist for dictionary or bruteforce attack using --stout.
Alexander Peslyak, founder and CTO of Openwall, which created John the Ripper, says the password security-auditing tool is now nearly 20 percent faster at cracking Data Encryption Standard (DES) based password hashes a major improvement to the hacking tool.
This release has been sponsored by Rapid7, a leading provider of unified vulnerability management and penetration testing solutions.
The new DES S-box expressions and code have been replaced and offer a 17% improvement over the corresponding previous best results.
Specifically, for the instruction set of typical x86 CPUs (MMX, SSE2, AVX), Matthew Kwan's S-box expressions (generated in 1998) required an average of 53.375 gates per S-box (XNOR gates had to be substituted with pairs of other gates).
Roman's S-box expressions need only 44.125 gates per S-box.
NOTE: For full S-box support/improvements the program requires a 64-bit system with at least 5GB of RAM.
Other changes in 1.7.8 release are:
More details about this release can be found on Openwall Official WebSite.
The latest downloadable version of JTR and Jumbo patches are available here:
Download John the Ripper