Contact:
Amanda Munroe
617-779-1816
<amunroe at shiftcomm.com>
“JOHN THE RIPPER”
OPEN SOURCE PASSWORD CRACKER OFFERS INCREASED SPEED THROUGH
17 PERCENT IMPROVEMENT
IN GATE COUNT FOR DATA ENCRYPTION STANDARD (DES) ALGORITHM
Moscow – June 22, 2011 –
Openwall, an open source-based, professional IT and security services company,
has released an updated version of
“John the Ripper,”
a password security auditing
tool and open source project, providing the community with
significant improvements in the performance of cracking password
hashes based on the Data Encryption Standard (DES) algorithm on CPUs.
In an effort led by Roman Rusakov and Alexander Peslyak, the Openwall
team’s breakthrough for more optimal DES S-box expressions
provides a 17 percent improvement over the previous best results. The
S-box expressions generated under this effort are being made publicly
available, are not copyrighted and are free for reuse by anyone.
“This area has been a struggle for many years,” said Alexander
Peslyak, Openwall founder and CTO, and a well-known security
researcher. “We are thrilled to finally have an enhanced
solution. We expect, and encourage, that many of our fellow password
security auditing programs that support DES-based hashes will also
make use of these new S-box expressions.”
Since 1998, numerous attempts have been made to arrive at more optimal DES
S-box expressions. During the past year, Openwall researchers
developed an idea to approach the optimization problem differently
and, as a result, were able to design and successfully implement a
new algorithm that significantly improves upon the corresponding
prior results. This new approach is easily adaptable to arbitrary
sets of "logic gates." The team has generated different
S-box expressions targeting both typical CPUs with only basic
instructions and CPUs/GPUs that have "bit select"
instructions. The mentioned improvement over the corresponding
previous best results is achieved in both cases.
"The continued improvement of John the Ripper is important to the IT audit
field in general because it allows auditors to quickly evaluate
system, application and database compliance with corporate password
policies based on the user account samples they have selected for an
audit. A 20 percent speedup where John the Ripper is used for testing
can greatly reduce the time required for password policy validation,
particularly for large enterprises," said Erik Winkler, vice
president of North America,
ControlCase,
a compliance management company.
Besides generating simpler S-box expressions in terms of gate count,
efficiency of the corresponding program code was considered and
thousands of different same-gate-count expressions were created to
generate the best possible code for specific CPU and GPU
architectures.
Further, the Openwall researchers implemented and ran special-purpose CPU
register allocation and code generation algorithms with intertwined
S-box expression and code generation stages, allowing for a further
performance boost of the resulting program code.
“The
researchers at Openwall deserve significant recognition for
discovering and providing a new approach to addressing
performance-critical S-box expressions. By providing this new
approach free-of-charge through John the Ripper, Openwall is making
another major impact on the open source and security communities,”
said HD Moore, Rapid7® CSO and Metasploit chief architect.
Continuing its active engagement and support for the open source community,
Rapid7,
the leading provider of unified
vulnerability management
and
penetration testing
solutions, has been supporting John the Ripper
for the past year in order to help complete the project’s
research. As well as sponsoring the development of this latest
version of John the Ripper, Rapid7 backed the recent addition of
support for Intel AVX and AMD XOP instruction set extensions, as well
as parallelization of the bitslice DES implementation with OpenMP
(for multi-core and multi-CPU machines). Working with Openwall to
support this project has also enabled the Rapid7 team to develop
greater technical integration with the John the Ripper solution for
upcoming versions of
Metasploit®.
This sponsorship adds to Rapid7’s growing community involvement.
In 2009, Rapid7 acquired the Metasploit Project, the world’s
largest database of public, tested exploits, supporting the project
as it became the most widely used penetration testing solution in the
market with more than one million unique downloads in the past year
alone. In July 2010, Rapid7 announced a sponsorship and partnership
with w3af,
the open source Web application attack and audit framework, to expand
its collaboration with the open source community and further provide
the industry with solutions for securing Web and application
infrastructure.
About Openwall
Openwall is an open source-based company that
provides businesses with cost-effective and secure solutions and
services
for their information technology needs, including system
administration, remote server administration, system integration and
consulting. Openwall’s experts manage, contribute to and use
open source projects and technologies, including the John the Ripper
project, a password auditing tool, and
Openwall GNU/*/Linux (Owl)
project, a security-enhanced Linux distribution for servers,
appliances and virtual appliances. For more information about
Openwall, its open source projects and commercial products, including
John the Ripper Pro,
please visit www.openwall.com.
About Rapid7
Rapid7 is the leading provider of unified vulnerability management
and penetration testing solutions, delivering actionable intelligence
about an organization’s entire IT environment. Rapid7 offers
the only integrated threat management solution that enables
organizations to implement and maintain best practices and optimize
their
network security,
Web application security and
database security strategies.
Recognized as the fastest growing vulnerability management company in the U.S.
by Inc. Magazine,
Rapid7 helps leading organizations such as Liz Claiborne,
the United States Postal Service, Carnegie Mellon University and Red Bull
to mitigate risk and maintain compliance for regulations such as
PCI, HIPAA, FISMA, SOX and NERC. Rapid7 also manages the
Metasploit Project,
the leading open-source penetration testing platform with the world’s
largest database of public, tested exploits.
To obtain a free download of NeXpose® or Metasploit, please visit
http://www.rapid7.com/resources/free-downloads.jsp.
For more information, visit
www.rapid7.com.
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