hashcat

hashcat is the world's fastest and most advanced GPU-based password recovery utility, claiming the title of the world's first and only in-kernel rule engine for password cracking. Free and open-source under the MIT License, hashcat supports multi-OS (Linux, Windows, macOS) and multi-platform computing across CPUs, GPUs, and APUs through OpenCL, CUDA, ROCm, Metal, and PoCL runtimes. The current version is v7.1.2 (released August 2025), available as both pre-compiled binaries and source code with PGP signature verification. hashcat implements over 450 hash types including MD4, MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2 family (224, 256, 384, 512), SHA-3 family, BLAKE2 (b and s variants), RIPEMD, Whirlpool, GOST Streebog, scrypt, Argon2, bcrypt, PBKDF2 (HMAC-MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512), phpass, NTLM, Kerberos 5 (etypes 17, 18, 23), WPA/WPA2/WPA3, JWT, Cisco-IOS, Cisco-ASA, BitLocker, VeraCrypt, LUKS, 1Password, KeePass KDBX v2/v3/v4, LastPass, Bitwarden, Ansible Vault, 7-Zip, RAR3, RAR5, PKZIP, WinZip, PDF, Microsoft Office, and cryptocurrency wallets (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Electrum, MetaMask). Attack modes include Straight (dictionary), Combination (two dictionaries combined), Brute-force, Hybrid dict+mask, Hybrid mask+dict, and Association. Key features include multi-hash cracking (multiple hashes simultaneously), multi-device utilization (multiple GPUs in same system), distributed cracking networks via overlay, interactive pause/resume, session management with restore capability, automatic performance tuning, automatic keyspace ordering with Markov chains, built-in benchmarking, integrated thermal watchdog for GPU temperature monitoring, password candidate brain functionality, hex-salt and hex-charset support, and reading candidates from file or stdin. hashcat requires specific GPU drivers: NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit, AMD ROCm (Linux) or AMD HIP SDK (Windows), or Intel Compute Runtime.