http://www.darkreading.com/authentication/167901072/security/vulnerabilities/231000218/john-the-ripper-gets-a-face-lift.html By Kelly Jackson Higgins Dark Reading June 22, 2011 One of the industry's first open-source password-cracking tools just got a big boost in power and performance with sponsorship from Rapid7, which also plans to more tightly integrate the so-called John the Ripper tool with Metasploit. Alexander Peslyak, founder and CTO of Openwall, which created John the Ripper, says the password security-auditing tool is now nearly 20 percent faster at cracking Data Encryption Standard (DES)-based password hashes -- a major improvement to the hacking tool. That means a major decrease in the time and effort to validate whether passwords are following company policy for strength, for instance. Openwall also is offering via open source the method by which it sped up this process, using more optimal "S-box expressions," which are basically substitution tables used in calculations. The organization came up with a faster and more efficient way to perform these calculations. "Recently, Roman Rusakov on our team came up with an idea on how to make use of modern computers' much greater amounts of memory and higher processing power to approach the optimization problem differently and achieve better results in a reasonable time," Openwall's Peslyak says. "So this is what we did." [...] ___________________________________________________________ Tegatai Managed Colocation: Four Provider Blended Tier-1 Bandwidth, Fortinet Universal Threat Management, Natural Disaster Avoidance, Always-On Power Delivery Network, Cisco Switches, SAS 70 Type II Datacenter. Find peace of mind, Defend your Critical Infrastructure. http://www.tegataiphoenix.com/Received on Mon Jun 27 2011 - 00:40:36 PDT
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