Hashcat

Origins and the Shift to GPUs

Hashcat was created by German security researcher Jens "atom" Steube, alongside co-developer Gabriele "matrix" Gristina, as a password recovery utility that originally ran entirely on the CPU. As commodity graphics cards became viable for general-purpose parallel computation, Steube built companion GPU-accelerated versions — oclHashcat, built on the cross-vendor OpenCL framework, and cudaHashcat, built on NVIDIA's CUDA platform.

Why GPU Acceleration Mattered

Because password-hashing functions such as MD5, SHA-1, and NTLM were designed to be computed quickly rather than slowly, they can be evaluated far faster across a GPU's thousands of parallel cores than on a CPU. This made oclHashcat and cudaHashcat dramatically faster than CPU-bound crackers, turning what had been an impractically slow brute-force exercise into a realistic attack against all but the strongest passwords.

Merger, Hash Coverage, and Attack Modes

With the release of hashcat v3.00 on June 29, 2016, Steube's team merged the GPU-based oclHashcat/cudaHashcat line and the original CPU tool into a single unified application, with the older CPU-only tool renamed hashcat-legacy. Its library of supported hash types grew to several hundred algorithms, spanning raw and salted hashes, key-derivation functions, and formats specific to databases, operating systems, and cryptocurrency wallets. Hashcat also expanded well beyond simple dictionary and brute-force guessing, adding rule-based, combinator, hybrid, mask, and PRINCE attack modes.

Open-Sourcing and Security Research

Hashcat's codebase was proprietary until 2015, when Steube released it as open-source software under the MIT License. Work on hashcat has also produced original security findings: in August 2018, the hashcat team, while investigating WPA3, accidentally discovered a new attack against WPA/WPA2-PSK Wi-Fi networks based on the PMKID field transmitted in 802.11 management frames.

Legacy

Team Hashcat has repeatedly won the DEF CON "Crack Me If You Can" password-cracking contest. Distributed free under an open-source license, hashcat — alongside the older CPU-based John the Ripper — is widely regarded as one of the two dominant tools for password auditing, penetration testing, and forensic password recovery.

Timeline

• 2015Hashcat's previously proprietary codebase is released as open-source software under the MIT License.
• 2016-06-29Hashcat v3.00 merges the GPU-based oclHashcat/cudaHashcat line with the original CPU tool into one unified application.
• 2018-08-04The hashcat team publicly discloses a new PMKID-based attack against WPA/WPA2-PSK Wi-Fi networks, discovered while researching WPA3.