hashcat

Hashcat is a password recovery tool used to recover lost or forgotten passwords from their hashes. It is an open source tool released under the MIT license and designed to assist users and security professionals in recovering and auditing passwords. Its developers describe it as the world's fastest password cracker. It uses a variety of attack modes to recover passwords, including dictionary, combinator, brute-force (mask), hybrid and association attacks.

Hashcat provides a powerful suite of features that make it a valuable tool for users who need to recover passwords. Hashcat can be used on Windows, Linux and macOS. It supports more than 450 hash algorithms, including MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512, NTLM, bcrypt and many more, as well as hashes of protected archives, office documents and cryptocurrency wallets. The maximum password length depends on the hash type and on the kernel used.

Hashcat also offers a wide range of customization options for users. Its in-kernel rule engine modifies words from wordlists on the fly, and masks with custom character sets define the patterns for brute-force attacks. Hashcat is a command-line program; it has no graphical user interface of its own.

Hashcat enables users to perform highly efficient and accelerated password cracking using advanced methods and techniques.

Hashcat also offers extensive support for graphics processing units (GPUs). It uses NVIDIA, AMD and Intel GPUs and CPUs through CUDA, HIP, OpenCL and Metal, and can combine several devices of different types. Hashcat also supports distributed cracking networks through an overlay, allowing users to spread the work of cracking passwords across multiple computers.

The main features of Hashcat include:

• Support for more than 450 hash algorithms
• Dictionary, mask, hybrid and rule-based attacks
• Custom wordlists, rules and masks for dictionary and brute-force attacks
• Interactive pause, resume and session restore
• Support for multiple GPUs
• Distributed cracking support
• Built-in benchmark, performance tuning and thermal watchdog
• Open source code available on GitHub