John the Ripper 1.7.3.4 released

John the Ripper is a fast password cracker, currently available for many flavors of Unix, Windows, DOS, BeOS, and OpenVMS. Its primary purpose is to detect weak Unix passwords.

Besides several crypt password hash types most commonly found on various Unix systems, supported out of the box are Windows LM hashes, plus many more with contributed patches.

The following changes have been made between versions 1.7.3.1 and 1.7.3.4:

• “make check” has been implemented (for Unix-like systems only).
• The “–test” option will now take an optional argument – the duration of each benchmark in seconds.
• Section .note.GNU-stack has been added to all assembly files to avoid the stack area unnecessarily being made executable on Linux systems that use this mechanism.
• Some very minor bugs that did not affect normal operation have been fixed.
• Some unimportant compiler warnings have been fixed, a source code comment has been made more verbose and more complete.