Verify status and progress with skill/pkill.įor sake of brevity we will skip the first step which consists on getting the machines up and running with Kali Linux and and IP address so they can communicate between them In our case the environment looks like the following picture.

Copy hashes and wordlists to NFS share.

Install JtR 1.8 Jumbo edition with OpenMPI support.

Install and configure NFS on the server and clients.

Generate and distribute SSH keys and start SSH deamon.

Install and configure the network environment.

The steps needed to build this setup are:

In this way we will put the shared files (wordlists, dictionaries, hashes, pot file, etc.) on the master node making them accessible to any computer on the network. JtR community edition supports OpenMPI.įinally, to share the files across the different systems we will configure the NFS protocol. The OpenMPI implementation is developed and maintained by a consortium of academic, research, and industry partners. MPI stands for the Message Passing Interface and is a API used for high-end computing topics such as parallel computing and multi-core performance. For those who might know the open source version of the MPI framework allow us to parallelize the load of JtR across multiple systems. One is the official version and the other is the community-enhanced version known as “jumbo”. In this exercise we will be using the latest community edition which was released last December. JtR can be downloaded from and comes in two flavors. The tool was developed by Alexander Peslyak, better known as Solar Designer. Today is still one of the best tools available for password cracking – definitely the best when using CPUs’. Extremely feature rich, very fast, free and actively maintained. We will use John the Ripper (JtR) which is a remarkable piece of software. Therefore is recommended you run this type of scenarios in a controlled and isolated lab environment. In our case we will be downloading the ISO and installing it on the different systems. Please note all the steps will be done using the privileged root account due to the Kali Linux Root Policy. Depending on the reader’s choice, Kali Linux is available in ISO or VM. This distribution brings the instruments needed in order to execute the steps an intruder will eventually perform during an attack. Kali is one of the best suites available to practice, learn and perform offensive techniques. On all the machines we will be running Kali Linux. The goal is understand attack methods in order to create better defenses. By creating this small environment we foster the knowledge and promote learning about different tools and techniques. Below a quick step-by-step guide on how to install and run the latest version of John the Ripper across several system using OpenMPI framework taking advantage of NFS to share common files.

John the ripper kali linux download