JohnTheRipper MPI Cluster

Ansible project to automatically deploy a John The Ripper CPU-based password cracking cluster on APT-based hosts - built on top of my Ansible MPI project.

I should caveat the above by saying that I've only tested the scripts against Ubuntu v14.04. If you discover any problems using the playbook be sure to issue a pull-request.

Setup

To configure your Ubuntu machines as an MPI cluster first create an inventory file with a master node and slaves group.

master 10.211.55.178

[slaves]
10.211.55.177
10.211.55.175
10.211.55.176

Execute the Playbooks against the hosts, to setup MPI and install John The Ripper:

cd ./provisioning
ansible-playbook site.yml -i <PATH TO INVENTORY>

Usage

The setup will provide you with a shared directory (by default /srv/mpi_data) inside of which you put your hashes and wordlists etc. The slaves will then be able to access them along with the JtR binary also in the directory.

$ scp /home/walsingham/mary_hashes mpiuser@master:/srv/mpi_data

SSH into the master as mpiuser and start JohnTheRipper going by pointing MPI to the file listing the hosts and the JtR binary with your cracking options:

$ ssh mpiuser@master 'mpiexec \
    -hostfile /etc/mpi_hosts \
    /srv/mpi_data/JohnTheRipper/run/john /srv/mpi_data/mary_hashes'

Don't forget to adjust the number of available processors on each host in the hostfile /etc/mpi_hosts

Development

Vagrant is used to create development VMs against which you can test changes to the Ansible scripts.

1. Install Vagrant.

2. Provision and configure the local cluster with:

vagrant up

Once provisioned the Ansible Provisioner creates a inventory which can be used manually with the ansible-playbook utility:

cd ./provisioning
ansible-playbook site.yml -i ../.vagrant/provisioners/ansible/inventory/vagrant_ansible_inventory

Or you can let Vagrant do the provisioning:

vagrant provision