openwall/john

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases no_license

Adoption not part of the score

13543 stars · 2543 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

John the Ripper jumbo is an open-source offline password cracker supporting hundreds of hash and cipher types, from Unix and Windows password hashes to encrypted archives, keys, and disk images. It runs on many operating systems and accelerates cracking on CPUs (SIMD, OpenMP, MPI) and GPUs (OpenCL), plus some FPGAs.

Use cases

• crack weak unix passwords
• recover a forgotten zip or rar archive password
• audit password strength across an organization
• crack wpa-psk handshakes from a wifi capture
• decrypt an encrypted pdf or office document password
• recover ssh or gpg private key passphrases
• test password hashes from a database dump

When to choose

• you need to crack or audit a wide variety of hash and cipher types offline
• you want GPU acceleration via OpenCL for faster cracking
• you need a mature, actively maintained open-source password recovery tool
• you are doing penetration testing or security auditing of authentication systems

When to avoid

• you need online or network-based password attacks rather than offline hash cracking
• you want a GUI-driven cracking workflow with minimal configuration
• you need to crack passwords protected by modern memory-hard KDFs at scale without significant hardware
• you require a commercially supported product without the jumbo version's experimental edge

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

security cryptography cli gpu-computing security penetration-testing developer-tools windows cli cross-platform password-cracking hash-cracking password-audit opencl simd penetration-testing password-recovery john-the-ripper command-line linux macos gpu

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