The John the Ripper open source password cracker security research tool is getting a performance boost.
The specific improvements that have been made deal with performance gains for cracking data encryption standard (DES) based password hashes. According to Openwall, the DES improvements have led to a 17 percent performance boost for cracking password hashes.
The DES improvements are available in the Jack the Ripper 1.7.8 release under an open source license.
“We believe that John the Ripper is a critical piece of the open source security ecosystem and it will continue to raise the bar,” HD Moore, Metasploit chief architect and Rapid7 CSO told InternetNews.com