John the Ripper is a fast password cracker, currently available for many flavors of Unix, Windows, DOS, BeOS, and OpenVMS. Its primary purpose is to detect weak Unix passwords. It supports several crypt(3) password hash types commonly found on Unix systems, as well as Windows LM hashes. On top of this, many other hash types are added with contributed patches, and some are added in John the Ripper Pro. Changes: Incremental mode's efficiency has been improved, and its length and character set limitations in default builds have been lifted. More speed metrics have been added to the status line. Trivial parallel and distributed processing has been implemented with new --fork and --node options. Bitmaps have been implemented for faster comparison of computed vs. loaded hashes. Cracking of bcrypt on 32-bit x86 with GCC 4.2+ and DES-based tripcodes has been sped up. Reconstruction of ASCII encodings of LM hashes has been implemented to save RAM. The formats interface has been made more GPU-friendly. Many formats have been renamed. The license has been relaxed.
