Ο Jens Steube, creator of the Hashcat cracking toolkit, has announced that his application and all its derivatives will henceforth be made available under an 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 must be integrated into the kernel during duration of compilation [...] This means that the kernel should be compiled at runtime implementations from the user's system. This kind of setup with the kernel adjusting according to salt/hash is only possible if the source code is available.”
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 Password program Cracker exist as of today under license from MIT at GitHub.
The open source announcement was made via encrypted twitter message:
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: 1852d73f8cc07b9354a2b9159bee07d7
- hashcat (@hashcat) December 4, 2015
