Which of these tools is commonly used to crack passwords?

John the Ripper is a well-known, open-source password security auditing and password recovery tool. Its primary function is to detect weak passwords by taking stored password hashes (e.g., from /etc/shadow files or database dumps) and attempting to discover the original plaintext password. It employs several methods, including dictionary attacks, brute-force attacks, and custom rule-based attacks. It supports a vast number of hash and cipher types, making it a quintessential and specialized tool specifically for the task of password cracking.

A. Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer used for capturing and inspecting data packets on a network, not for cracking password hashes.

C. Nslookup is a network administration command-line tool used for querying the Domain Name System (DNS) to resolve domain names.

D. Burp Suite is a comprehensive platform for web application security testing, primarily used as a proxy to intercept and manipulate web traffic.

1. Openwall Project (Official Vendor Documentation). The official project page for John the Ripper explicitly describes it as a "fast password cracker

currently available for many flavors of Unix

macOS

Windows

DOS

BeOS

and OpenVMS."

Source: Openwall

"John the Ripper password cracker

" Home Page. Retrieved from https://www.openwall.com/john/

2. University Courseware. In the course materials for "CS 42600: Computer Security" at Purdue University

a lab exercise is dedicated to password security where students are instructed to use John the Ripper to crack password hashes.

Source: Purdue University

Department of Computer Science

"CS 42600 Lab 2: Password Cracking

" Lab Manual

Page 2.

3. Peer-reviewed Academic Publication. A study on password cracking techniques explicitly categorizes John the Ripper as a primary tool for this purpose

detailing its functionality alongside other similar tools.

Source: Al-Harbi

S.

Al-Ghamdi

A.

& Al-Turki

M. (2020). A survey on password cracking. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA)

11(10). Section IV

Part A. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2020.0111069