Jens Steube, creator of the Hashcat cracking toolkit, has announced that his application and all its derivatives will now be available under an open source license.
The main reason for this move, as Steube states, has to do with the performance of the application.
“The ultimate reason I decided to open source was the implementation of bitsliced DES GPU kernels,” Steube says on his website’s forum.
“To achieve maximum efficiency and performance, the salt must be integrated into the kernel during compilation […] This means that the kernel must be compiled at runtime by the user’s system. This kind of tuning, with the kernel adapting according to the salt/hash, is only possible if the source code is available.”
There are of course other reasons that are similar, such as the need for some pentesters to use the tool and its algorithms without exposing sensitive information, but above all, the main driving force behind this policy change is performance-related.
So both versions of the Hashcat Password Cracker program are available today under the MIT license on GitHub.
The open source announcement was made via Twitter with an encrypted message:
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: 1852d73f8cc07b9354a2b9159bee07d7
— hashcat (@hashcat) December 4, 2015
