hashcat

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

26631 stars · 3539 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Hashcat is the world's fastest and most advanced password recovery utility, supporting over 300 highly-optimized hashing algorithms across five attack modes. It runs on CPUs, GPUs, and other OpenCL/CUDA-capable hardware on Linux, Windows, and macOS, with support for distributed cracking.

Use cases

• crack forgotten password hashes from a database dump
• recover a lost WiFi or archive password from its hash
• audit password strength during a penetration test
• benchmark GPU performance across hashing algorithms
• run distributed password cracking across multiple machines
• identify and crack an unknown hash type
• test dictionary and mask attacks against NTLM hashes

When to choose

• you need maximum cracking speed using GPU acceleration
• you need to support a very wide range of hash types (450+)
• you want rule-based, mask-based, or distributed attack modes
• you need cross-platform support on Linux, Windows, and macOS

When to avoid

• you only need to crack a single simple hash occasionally without GPU hardware
• you need a graphical interface rather than a command-line tool
• you want to crack encrypted files directly rather than hashes
• your GPU drivers or OpenCL/CUDA runtimes are not available

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

security cryptography gpu-computing cli benchmarking security penetration-testing gpu-computing windows cli cross-platform password-cracking hash-recovery opencl cuda gpu-accelerated penetration-testing dictionary-attack brute-force cryptography command-line linux macos gpu

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="hashcat/hashcat")