Cracking OpenVMS Passwords with John the Ripper

Jean-loup Gailly has written a patch for John the Ripper to allow cracking OpenVMS (Vax and Alpha) passwords. The patch is based on the code from Shawn Clifford, Davide Casale and Mario Ambrogetti.

John The Ripper, program written by Alexander Peslyak, allows fast cracking of users passwords that can be used by both sides of the security world – crackers and system administrators. As basically all of the Linux/UNIX security books suggest, system administrators should use Crack or John The Ripper for finding local users with weak passwords.

As the patch writer notes: “This patch has been tested on x86 only and does not work yet on big endian systems. It uses asm code for speed but a portable C version is included as well. The asm version checks about 150,000 passwords per second on a 1 GHz system. Password cracking is much easier on OpenVMS than on other systems since passwords are not case sensitive and limited to alphanumeric, ‘$’ and ‘_’ only.”