John the Ripper is a multi-platform password cracking tool.

While the standard distribution package of JtR is already a very capable application, there are several enhancements available which can increase both the variety of crackable encryption schemes, password complexity, and the performance of JtR itself.

The rest of the chapter will cover both the installation steps for each of the enhancements as well as brief description of their operation. This chapter assumes you have a Linux based system (e.g Ubuntu) all of the necessary compilation and build tools installed.

First we will need to download and extract complete JtR source code. At the time of this writing the latest version of JtR is 1.7.6.

wget http://www.openwall.com/john/g/john-1.7.6.tar.bz2
tar -xvjf john-1.7.6.tar.bz2

Next let's download a “Jumbo” patch for the JtR which contains code contributed by the user community. While the contributed code base is not as mature as the original JtR code base, the patch contributes a number of newer encryption and hashing algorithms. Below are the steps to download the patch and apply it to the previously downloaded source.

wget http://www.openwall.com/john/contrib/john-1.7.6-jumbo-3.diff.gz
gunzip john-1.7.6-jumbo-3.diff.gz
cd john-1.7.6
patch -p1 < ../john-1.7.6-jumbo-3.diff

Note: You have to apply the patch by changing the directory into the extracted source. Another key enhancement that can be performed upon already optimized code is to teach JtR how to operate in multi-processor environments. There are a number of solutions available, but the most reliable of them are all based on the Message Passing Interface (MPI) architecture. First we need to download and setup MPI daemon on the host operating system:

sudo apt-get install mpich2 libssl-dev
mpdboot
mpdallexit

With the MPI infrastructure installed and running, we can now apply another patch to JtR:

wget http://openwall.info/wiki/_media/john/john-1.7.6-fullmpi8-after-jumbo3.diff.gz
gunzip john-1.7.6-fullmpi8-after-jumbo3.diff.gz
cd john-1.7.6
patch -p1 < ../john-1.7.6-fullmpi8-after-jumbo3.diff

Note: As you can tell from the patch name, it is designed to be applied after the installation of the “Jumbo” patch.

The last step in preparing our enhanced JtR installation is to compile it for the specific CPU architecture. This is done by means of special flags appended to the “make” command. For example, to take advantage of 64bit processors append “linux-x86-64”. For 32bit CPUs use “linux-x86-sse2” or “generic”.

cd john-1.7.6
cd src
make linux-x86-64
sudo make install

You can now test JtR with full MPI capabilities with the following command line:

mpiexec -n 4 ~/john-1.7.6/run/john –test

NOTE: -n 4 defines how many cores to use. Use more or less as needed With all of the enhancements to the John the Ripper, we can now apply a new charset file based on passwords from a recent RockYou compromise. The new charset file will enhance JtR's incremental cracking mode. First, let's download the updated *.chr file:

cd john-1.7.6
cd run
wget ftp://ftp.openwall.com/pub/projects/john/contrib/rockyou/1.1/rockyou.chr.gz
gunzip rockyou.chr.gz

Next, edit “john.conf” file to include new rules by adding the following lines:

[Incremental:rockyou]
File = $JOHN/rockyou.chr
MinLen = 1
MaxLen = 8
CharCount = 95

To execute JtR with a new charset file use the following command line to run John in incremental mode:

~/john-1.7.6/run/john --incremental:rockyou passwd

or with MPI:

mpiexec -n 4 ~/john-1.7.6/run/john --incremental:rockyou passwd