John the Ripper 1.7.9 Released

John the Ripper version 1.7.9 released & available for download. 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. It supports several crypt(3) password hash types commonly found on Unix systems, as well as Windows LM hashes.

Official change log for John the Ripper 1.7.9 :-

Added optional parallelization of the MD5-based crypt(3) code with OpenMP.
Added optional parallelization of the bitslice DES code with OpenMP.
Replaced the bitslice DES key setup algorithm with a faster one, which significantly improves performance at LM hashes, as well as at DES-based crypt(3) hashes when there’s just one salt (or very few salts).
Optimized the DES S-box x86-64 (16-register SSE2) assembly code.
Added support for 10-character DES-based tripcodes (not optimized yet).
Added support for the “$2y$” prefix of bcrypt hashes.
Added two more hash table sizes (16M and 128M entries) for faster processing of very large numbers of hashes per salt (over 1M).
Added two pre-defined external mode variables: “abort” and “status”, which let an external mode request the current cracking session to be aborted or the status line to be displayed, respectively.
Made some minor optimizations to external mode function calls and virtual machine implementation of John the Ripper.
The “–make-charset” option now uses floating-point rather than 64-bit integer operations, which allows for larger CHARSET_settings in params.h.
Added runtime detection of Intel AVX and AMD XOP instruction set extensions, with optional fallback to an alternate program binary.
In OpenMP-enabled builds, added support for fallback to a non-OpenMP build when the requested thread count is 1.
Added relbench, a Perl script to compare two “john –test” benchmark runs, such as for different machines, “make” targets, C compilers, optimization options, or/and versions of John the Ripper.
Additional public lists of “top N passwords” have been merged into the bundled common passwords list, and some insufficiently common passwords were removed from the list.
Many minor enhancements and a few bug fixes were made.