Thread-topic: John the Ripper 1.7; pam_passwdqc 1.0+; tcb 1.0; phpass 0.0
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Solar Designer [mailto:solar@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2006 5:07 AM
> To: bugtraq@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: John the Ripper 1.7; pam_passwdqc 1.0+; tcb 1.0; phpass 0.0
>
> Hi,
>
> This is to announce several related items at once. :-)
>
> After 7+ years of development snapshots only (yes, I know, that was
> wrong), John the Ripper 1.7 release is out:
>
>
>
> John the Ripper is a fast password cracker, currently available for
> many flavors of Unix (11 are officially supported, not counting
> different architectures), DOS, Win32, BeOS, and OpenVMS (the latter
> with a patch or unofficial builds by Jean-loup Gailly). Its primary
> purpose is to detect weak Unix passwords. Besides several crypt(3)
> password hash types most commonly found on various Unix flavors,
> supported out of the box are Kerberos/AFS and Windows NT/2000/XP LM
> hashes, plus many more with contributed patches.
>
> The changes made since the last development snapshot (1.6.40)
> are minor,
> however the changes made since 1.6 are substantial:
>
>
>
> John the Ripper became a lot faster, primarily at DES-based hashes.
> This is possible due to the use of better algorithms (bringing more
> inherent parallelism of trying multiple candidate passwords down to
> processor instruction level), better optimized code, and new hardware
> capabilities (such as AltiVec available on PowerPC G4 and G5
> processors).
>
> In particular, John the Ripper 1.7 is a lot faster at Windows
> LM hashes
> than version 1.6 used to be. John's "raw" performance at LM hashes is
> now similar to or even slightly better than that of commercial Windows
> password crackers such as LC5, -- and that's despite John trying
> candidate passwords in a more sophisticated order based on statistical
> information (resulting in typical passwords getting cracked earlier).
>
> John 1.7 also improves on the use of MMX on x86 and starts to use
> AltiVec on PowerPC processors when cracking DES-based hashes (that
> is, both Unix crypt(3) and Windows LM hashes). To my knowledge, John
> 1.7 (or rather, one of the development snapshots leading to this
> release) is the first program to cross the 1 million Unix crypts per
> second boundary on a general-purpose CPU. John 1.7 achieves up to
> 1.6M c/s raw performance (with no matching salts) on a PowerPC G5 at
> 2.7 GHz (or 1.1M c/s on a 1.8 GHz) and approaches 1M c/s on
> the fastest
> x86 CPUs currently available.
>
> Additionally, John 1.7 makes an attempt at generic
> vectorization support
> for bitslice DES (would anyone try to set DES_BS_VECTOR high
> and compile
> this on a real vector computer, with compiler vectorizations
> enabled?),
> will do two MD5 hashes at a time on RISC architectures (with mixed
> instructions, allowing more instructions to be issued each cycle), and
> includes some Blowfish x86 assembly code optimizations for older x86
> processors (Intel PPro through P3 and AMD K6) with no impact on newer
> ones due to runtime CPU type detection.
>
> Speaking of the actual features, John the Ripper 1.7 adds an event
> logging framework (John will now log how it proceeds through stages of
> each of its cracking modes - word mangling rules being tried, etc.),
> better idle priority emulation with POSIX scheduling calls (once
> enabled, this almost eliminates any impact John has on performance of
> other applications on the system), system-wide installation
> support for
> use by *BSD ports and Linux distributions, and support for AIX,
> DU/Tru64 C2, and HP-UX tcb files in the "unshadow" utility.
>
> Finally, there are plenty of added pre-configured make targets with
> optimal settings, including for popular platforms such as
> Linux/x86-64,
> Linux/PowerPC (including ppc64 and AltiVec), Mac OS X
> (PowerPC and x86),
> Solaris/sparc64, OpenBSD on almost anything 32-bit and
> 64-bit, and more.
>
> On a related note, pam_passwdqc and our tcb suite became mature enough
> for their 1.0 releases.
>
> pam_passwdqc is a simple password strength checking module
> for PAM-aware
> password changing programs, such as passwd(1). In addition
> to checking
> regular passwords, it offers support for passphrases and can provide
> randomly generated ones. All features are optional and can be
> (re-)configured without rebuilding.
>
> pam_passwdqc works on Linux, FreeBSD 5+ (in fact, it's been integrated
> into FreeBSD), Solaris, HP-UX 11+, and reportedly on recent
> versions of
> IRIX. Additionally, Damien Miller has developed and contributed a
> plugin password strength checker for OpenBSD based on pam_passwdqc.
> This plugin is now linked from the contributed resources list on the
> pam_passwdqc homepage:
>
>
>
> The tcb package contains core components of our tcb suite implementing
> the alternative password shadowing scheme on Openwall GNU/*/Linux and
> distributions by ALT Linux team. This allows core system
> utilities such
> as passwd(1) to operate with little privilege, eliminating
> the need for
> SUID to root programs. The tcb suite has been in production use for
> some years and has proven to work well. Its homepage is:
>
>
>
> The tcb suite has been designed and implemented primarily by
> Rafal Wojtczuk,
> with significant contributions from me and Dmitry V. Levin.
>
> Finally, I've developed and placed into the public domain a
> portable PHP
> password hashing framework. The intent is to allow PHP application
> developers to use state of the art password hashing without
> learning the
> arcane details of the PHP crypt() function. The homepage for this
> framework is:
>
>
>
> Enjoy!
>
> --
> Alexander Peslyak <solar at openwall.com>
> GPG key ID: B35D3598 fp: 6429 0D7E F130 C13E C929 6447 73C3
> A290 B35D 3598
> - bringing security into open
> computing environments
>
