hons.un-excogitate.org

ASMCrack

ASMCrack - another one of those cracking utilities that slipped through my finger-tips.

<quote>
ASMCrack is a unix password security tool. It checks the password file by trying whether a given word matches an encrypted password that was within the password file. To do so it uses very speed optimized 386 assembly routines, with pentium alignment and command order optimisations. It consists of three program subversions, that use differently sized look-up tables. The speed of those versions depends on the hardware, especially on the RAM speed and the CPU cache's size.
</quote>

What's interesting about this program is it's (dumb/simple/clever) way of working on multiple computers - in fact - the same way that JTR-MPI (a peek inside jtr) works in an MPI environment.

First: Determine an approximate speed rating for each computer u want to use

asmcrack -test

Second: Create a file for each of the computers - and their rating

Computer0 : speed
Computer1 : speed
..
etc

Third: Run the program on each node with it's appropriate node-number

asmcrack -multi:config.file,0

..

Now, even though the author claims it's all optimised and that jazz, it is quite out-dated compared to JTR, so whether or not it would perform up to par is yet to be seen.