Jens Steube, creator of the Hashcat crack toolkit, announced that its application and all of its derivatives will now be available under open source license.
The main reason for this move, as reported by Steube, is related to the performance of the application.
"The final reason I decided to open the code was to implement bitsliced DES GPU kernels," Steube tells forum on his site.
“To achieve maximum performance and performance, salt should be included in the kernel context during compilation […] This means that the kernel should be compiled at runtime by the user's system. This kind of setup with the kernel adjusting according to the salt/hash is only possible if it is availables the source code.”
There are of course other reasons that are similar, such as the need for some pentesters to use the tool and its algorithms without exposing sensitive information, but above all, the main driving force behind this policy change is performance .
So both versions of the Hashcat program Password cracker exist as of today under license from MIT at GitHub.
The open source announcement was made through Twitter with encrypted message:
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: 1852d73f8cc07b9354a2b9159bee07d7
- hashcat (@hashcat) December 4, 2015
