Please note that "binary" (pre-compiled) distributions of John may
include alternate executables instead of just "john". You may need to
choose the executable that fits your system best, e.g. "john-omp" to
take advantage of multiple CPUs and/or CPU cores.
Features and performance.
John the Ripper is designed to be both feature-rich and fast. It
combines several cracking modes in one program and is fully
configurable for your particular needs (you can even define a custom
cracking mode using the built-in compiler supporting a subset of C).
Also, John is available for several different platforms which enables
you to use the same cracker everywhere (you can even continue a
cracking session which you started on another platform).
Out of the box, John supports (and autodetects) the following Unix
crypt(3) hash types: traditional DES-based, "bigcrypt", BSDI extended
DES-based, FreeBSD MD5-based (also used on Linux and in Cisco IOS), and
OpenBSD Blowfish-based (now also used on some Linux distributions and
supported by recent versions of Solaris). Also supported out of the box
are Kerberos/AFS and Windows LM (DES-based) hashes, as well as DES-based
tripcodes.
When running on Linux distributions with glibc 2.7+, John 1.7.6+
additionally supports (and autodetects) SHA-crypt hashes (which are
actually used by recent versions of Fedora and Ubuntu), with optional
OpenMP parallelization (requires GCC 4.2+, needs to be explicitly
enabled at compile-time by uncommenting the proper OMPFLAGS line near
the beginning of the Makefile).
Similarly, when running on recent versions of Solaris, John 1.7.6+
supports and autodetects SHA-crypt and SunMD5 hashes, also with
optional OpenMP parallelization (requires GCC 4.2+ or recent Sun Studio,
needs to be explicitly enabled at compile-time by uncommenting the
proper OMPFLAGS line near the beginning of the Makefile and at runtime
by setting the OMP_NUM_THREADS environment variable to the desired
number of threads).
John the Ripper Pro adds support for Windows NTLM (MD4-based) and Mac
OS X 10.4+ salted SHA-1 hashes.
"Community enhanced" -jumbo versions add support for many more password
hash types, including Windows NTLM (MD4-based), Mac OS X 10.4-10.6
salted SHA-1 hashes, Mac OS X 10.7 salted SHA-512 hashes, raw MD5 and
SHA-1, arbitrary MD5-based "web application" password hash types, hashes
used by SQL database servers (MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle) and by some LDAP
servers, several hash types used on OpenVMS, password hashes of the
Eggdrop IRC bot, and lots of other hash types, as well as many
non-hashes such as OpenSSH private keys, S/Key skeykeys files, Kerberos
TGTs, PDF files, ZIP (classic PKZIP and WinZip/AES) and RAR archives.
Unlike older crackers, John normally does not use a crypt(3)-style
: