For those of you in the pentesting world, atom, the principal developer of hashcat and oclHashcat has announced that they are going to be released to open source.  In the release he reveals a number of good reasons why it makes sense to do this at this time, but the biggest one being to permit advancement in the bitsliced DES GPU kernels.  Essentially in order to take full advantage of the bitsliced GPU capabilities requires recompilation of the kernel at run time, and this requires the source code to hashcat be available.  "Bit slicing allows to reach a much higher cracking rate of DES-based algorithms (LM, Oracle, DEScrypt, RACF). DEScrypt, for instance, which is well known on Unix-like systems, can reach a performance gain of 300-400% with the bit slice technique."

These capabilities are available with the the version 2.0 code which was released on github right after the announcement.

-- Rick Wanner MSISE - rwanner at isc dot sans dot edu - http://namedeplume.blogspot.com/ - Twitter:namedeplume (Protected)