hashcat

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

26999 stars · 3577 forks observed · 2026-10-16

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-10-05, confidence 0.99

Hashcat is a high‑performance password recovery utility that runs on CPUs, GPUs and distributed systems. It supports hundreds of hash algorithms and multiple attack modes such as wordlist, brute‑force, and rule‑based attacks.

Use cases

• recover a lost password from a hashed file
• test the strength of password hashes in a security audit
• perform large‑scale hash cracking on GPU clusters
• benchmark hash algorithm performance on different hardware
• run custom cracking rules written in C, Python or Rust
• crack multiple hash types simultaneously in a single session

When to choose

• You need the fastest available password cracking tool and have access to GPU hardware.
• You require support for a wide variety of hash algorithms and attack modes.
• You want to run distributed cracking jobs across multiple machines.

When to avoid

• You lack compatible GPU drivers or hardware acceleration and only have CPU resources.
• You need a graphical user interface; Hashcat is primarily a CLI tool.
• You require a fully licensed commercial solution with official support.

Facets

application · maturity active

cryptography security cli security gpu-computing windows cli gpu opencl cuda distributed-cracking password-cracking hashcat-legacy password-recovery linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

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