Considering today's challenges in digital forensics, for password cracking, distributed computing is a necessity. If we limit the selection of password-cracking tools strictly to open-source software, hashcat tool unambiguously wins in speed, repertory of supported hash formats, updates, and community support. Though hashcat itself is by design a single-machine solution, its interface makes it possible to use the tool as a base construction block of a larger distributed system. Creating a “distributed hashcat” which supports the maximum of hashcat's original features requires a smart controller that employs different distribution strategies in different cases. In the paper, we show how to use BOINC framework to control a network of hashcat-equipped nodes and provide a working solution for performing different cracking attacks. We also provide experimental results of multiple cracking tasks to demonstrate the applicability of our approach. Last but not least, we compare our solution to an existing hashcat-based distributed tool - Hashtopolis.

考虑到当今数字取证的挑战，对于密码破解来说，分布式计算是必不可少的。如果我们仅将密码破解工具的选择限制为开放源代码软件，则hashcat工具将在速度，支持的哈希格式库，更新和社区支持方面毫无疑问赢得胜利。尽管hashcat本身是设计上的单机解决方案，但其接口使将该工具用作较大的分布式系统的基本构建块成为可能。创建支持最大哈希猫原始功能的“分布式哈希猫”需要一个在不同情况下采用不同分发策略的智能控制器。在本文中，我们展示了如何使用BOINC框​​架来控制配备了hashcat的节点的网络，并为执行不同的破解攻击提供了可行的解决方案。我们还提供了多个破解任务的实验结果，以证明我们方法的适用性。最后但并非最不重要的一点是，我们将我们的解决方案与现有的基于hashcat的分布式工具Hashtopolis进行了比较。