Is it just me, or is john very very slow? I remember trying MD5 once, but the tries per second were in the thousands (whereas GPU-accelerated crackers do billions).

Maybe I'm misunderstanding and it was a few thousand rounds of MD5, though.

John isn't always the fastest anymore, but it's definitely not very, very slow. It also provides the widest support by far. (And most of the formats are GPU accelerated, OpenMP threaded, or SSE parallelized. John itself also supports MPI. Make sure you've configured the makefile right.) If there's a format you're trying to crack, chances are john provides a convenient and reasonably fast way to crack it.

Interesting, maybe I was doing something wrong. I was just using the package provided by Ubuntu.

Not sure which one is in the Ubuntu repository. Although John the Ripper is Solar Designer's baby, most of the current development (under Solar's guidance) occurs in the "jumbo" version led by another developer named magnum.

You can download that version here: https://github.com/magnumripper/JohnTheRipper

Then you can build it with CUDA or OpenCL, SSE, OpenMP, MPI, etc., support using the Makefile.

That's fantastic, thank you for the link.

If you use your Keepass vault every day, there is little chance of forgetting. And there is always paper backup, which can be hand encrypted.

> there is little chance of forgetting.

Head injury, neurological disease, etc.

Low probability events, which are covered by the (properly secured) paper.