In early December 2015, the official Hashcat Twitter account reported an important announcement as an MD5 hash. Decrypting the message revealed good news: “hashcat is now open source.” Later, the main developer of the popular password hacking and recovery tool, Steuben Jens, published a post on the official forum, where he mentioned the details and provided links to the Hashcat source code.
Steuben said he decided to open source both versions: the basic Hashcat tool, which handles CPU tasks, and oclHashcat, which handles GPU tasks.
Being a big fan of open source, Steuben had been considering this move for a long time. In particular, publishing the source code and Hashcat and oclHashcat under the MIT license allows pentesters and forensics experts to add and modify the algorithms without fear of revealing confidential data. Users can also easily integrate external libraries. Hashcat is expected to be included in popular Linux distributions.
oclHashcat supports OpenCL (AMD) and CUDA (Nvidia) and works on Linux and Windows platforms. Unfortunately, there is no support for OS X and earlier, since like Apple's platform it has some limitations. But with the transition to open source, OS X users will also be able to use oclHashcat.
The experts at “Kaspersky Lab” dedicated an entire separate article to the topic: source disclosure Hashcat, explaining why it is good, and what the positives of the now open Hashcat will be for both pentesters and the rest.
The source code and Hashcat oclHashcat are already available on GitHub. In his report, Steuben assured that he is not going to leave the project and intends to work hard on it.
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