Crack (password software)
Crack is a Unix password cracking program designed to allow system administrators to locate users who may have weak passwords vulnerable to a dictionary attack. Crack was the first standalone password cracker for Unix systems and the first to introduce programmable dictionary generation as well. Crack began in 1990 when Alec Muffett, a Unix system administrator at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, was trying to improve Dan Farmer's 'pwc' cracker in COPS. Muffett found that by re-engineering the memory management, he got a noticeable performance increase. This led to a total rewrite which became "Crack v2.0" and further development to improve usability. Public Releases The first public release of Crack was version 2.7a, which was posted to the Usenet newsgroups alt.sources and alt.security on 15 July 1991. Crack v3.2a+fcrypt, posted to comp.sources.misc on 23 August 1991, introduced an optimised version of the Unix crypt() function but was still only really a faster version of what was already available in other packages. The release of Crack v4.0a on 3 November 1991, however, introduced several new features that made it a formidable tool in the system administrator's arsenal. Programmable dictionary generator Network distributed password cracking Crack v5.0a released in 2000 did not