Update Pentesting tools News 22-Jun-2011

John The Ripper 1.7.8 released!

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:

Corrected support for bcrypt (OpenBSD Blowfish) hashes of passwords containing non-ASCII characters (that is, characters with the 8th bit set).
Added support for such hashes produced by crypt_blowfish up to 1.0.4, which contained a sign extension bug (inherited from older versions of John).
The old buggy behavior may be enabled per-hash, using the "$2x$" prefix.
The external mode virtual machine's performance has been improved through additional multi-op instructions matching common instruction sequences (assign-pop and some triple- and quad-push VM instructions were added).
A new sample external mode has been added to the default john.conf.
Few minor bug fixes and various other improvements were made.

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

Enjoy, Jano