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John the Ripper password cracker

John the Ripper is a fast password cracker, currently available for many flavors of Unix (11 are officially supported, not counting different architectures), Windows, DOS, BeOS, and OpenVMS. Its primary purpose is to detect weak Unix passwords. Besides several crypt(3) password hash types most commonly found on various Unix flavors, supported out of the box are Kerberos AFS and Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 LM hashes, plus several more with contributed patches.

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John the Ripper is free and Open Source software, distributed primarily in source code form. If you would rather use a commercial product tailored for your specific operating system, please consider John the Ripper Pro, which is distributed primarily in the form of "native" packages for the target operating systems and in general is meant to be easier to install and use while delivering optimal performance.

Proceed to John the Ripper Pro homepage for your OS:

Download one of the latest free "development" versions:

or the latest free "stable" release:

Please refer to these pages on how to extract John the Ripper source code from the tar.gz and tar.bz2 archives and how to build (compile) it.

The only change between 1.7.0.1 and 1.7.0.2 is irrelevant for 32-bit platforms, hence there are no builds of 1.7.0.2 for Windows and DOS (they would have been exactly the same as those of 1.7.0.1).

In practice, 1.7.2 (a "development" version) has been around for a long time now, and it has been found to be at least as stable as 1.7.0.2, so the use of 1.7.2 is recommended.

These and older versions of John the Ripper are also available via FTP locally and from the mirrors. You are encouraged to use the mirrors, but be sure to verify the signatures.

John the Ripper 1.7 offers significant performance improvements over the 1.6 release.

You may browse the documentation for John the Ripper online. Also relevant is the recent SecurityFocus interview with Solar Designer, the author of John the Ripper.

There's a wiki section with John the Ripper user community resources. The more experienced users and software developers may browse the source code for John the Ripper online, along with revision history information for each source file.

There's a collection of wordlists for use with John the Ripper that may be purchased on a CD with delivery worldwide for $28.25 + USPS postage ($28.84 total in the US) or for $49.95 + UPS delivery, or the CD image or content may be downloaded for $27.95. The CDs include wordlists for 20+ human languages, lists of common passwords, and files with the common passwords and unique words for all the languages combined, also with mangling rules applied and any duplicates purged. The password cracker itself is included on the CDs, too. There's a total of over 600 MB of content.

Additionally, you may order Openwall GNU/*/Linux (Owl) on a CD, which includes a pre-built copy of John the Ripper ready for use without requiring another OS and without having to install on a hard disk (although that is supported). You may not even have a hard disk, or it may be fully occupied by an existing OS install which won't be used or touched. You just boot off the CD, enter the shell (bash and tcsh are included), optionally configure networking with the setup tool (say, if you need to transfer password files to the RAM disk), and start using John! The CD-booted system is fully functional, you may even let it go multi-user with virtual consoles and remote shell access. Besides John, also included and available for use right off the CD are Nmap port scanner, SSH (OpenSSH), FTP (lftp, vsftpd), and Telnet clients and servers, a text Web browser with SSL support (ELinks), an SMTP mail system (Postfix), a POP3 daemon (popa3d), a MUA with POP3 and IMAP client support (Mutt), and more.

An implementation of one of the modern password hashes found in John is also available separately for use in your software or on your servers.

There's a proactive password strength checking module for PAM-aware password changing programs, which can be used to prevent your users from choosing passwords that would be easily cracked with programs like John.

We may help you integrate modern password hashing with crypt_blowfish and/or proactive password strength checking with pam_passwdqc into your OS installs, please check out our services.

There's a mailing list where you can share your experience with John the Ripper and ask questions. Please be sure to specify an informative message subject whenever you post to the list (that is, something better than "question" or "problem"). To subscribe, send an empty message to <john-users-subscribe at lists.openwall.com> or enter your e-mail address below. You will be required to confirm your subscription by "replying" to the automated confirmation request that will be sent to you. You will be able to unsubscribe at any time and we will not use your e-mail address for any other purposes or share it with a third party. However, if you post to the list, other subscribers and those viewing the archives may see your address(es) as specified on your message. The list archive is available locally, as well as via Gmane and MARC. Additionally, there's a list of selected most useful and currently relevant postings on the community wiki.

Your e-mail address:

Contributed resources for John the Ripper:

Local copies of these and other related patches and packages are also available via FTP.

Please refer to this page on how to apply the patches.

John the Ripper is a part of Owl, Debian GNU/Linux, EnGarde Linux, Gentoo Linux, Mandriva Linux, and SUSE Linux. It is in the ports/packages collections of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.

John the Ripper is a registered project with freshmeat and Ohloh.

Support further work on this software with donations.

Came here looking for password recovery for popular file formats (such as Word, Excel, or PDF documents, or ZIP archives) rather than ways to detect weak OS passwords? You'll find that kind of software at ElcomSoft and also in the collection of pointers to password recovery resources available locally.

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