DJohn is a software tool that provides distributed computing capabilities to John the Ripper, making it capable of cracking passwords much faster than the standard John the Ripper package.
It is important to note that like John the Ripper, DJohn only supports brute force cracking, and does not have any built-in support for downloading password files. However, a contributed server/client in Perl is available to perform this task starting in version 0.9.8. Additionally, DJohn was specifically designed to be used in closed networks where all clients can be trusted, so security was not a primary concern.
To ensure optimal performance, all clients should have the same or similar CPU power. To check the server status, the utility djs can be used, though it can only be accessed from the machine the server is running on due to its use of shared memory for status reporting. A CGI front-end is also provided for remote server status monitoring.
In future releases, the DJohn team plans to merge their code with John the Ripper's codebase to incorporate different cracking methods. The latest release includes a bugfix for instances where no passwords were cracked, but no notification was sent to the server. Overall, DJohn provides a powerful distributed password cracking solution for trusted networks.
Version 0.9.8.1: N/A