Large scale brute force cryptanalysis needs a tremendous amount of computational power that government agencies like the NSA and companies like Google have.
An average security researcher might want to have such capabilities as well but they do not have the tools or the computational resources. Moreover, they might not be skilled in writing software that takes advantage of the computational resources provided by commercial-off-the-shelf systems with CUDA and OpenCL capable GPUs and computational clusters provided by Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure.
With Wisecracker we bridge this gap by providing an open source framework for security researchers to write their own cryptanalysis tools that can distribute brute force cryptanalysis work across multiple systems with multiple multi-core processors and GPUs. Security researchers can also use the sample tools provided as part of Wisecracker out-of-the-box.
The differentiating aspect of Wisecracker is that it uses OpenCL and MPI together to distribute the work across multiple systems each having multiple CPUs and/or GPUs. We support the OpenCL libraries provided by Intel, AMD and NVIDIA, and support multiple operating systems such as Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX.
Wisecracker is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 and is free for anyone to use and enhance.
More information on the design details can be found at http://selectiveintellect.com/wisecracker.html .
The developers at Selective Intellect LLC would like to hear from you about Wisecracker if you like it or need a different license or need technical support. You can contact them at wisecracker@selectiveintellect.com.
- How to build the software =============================
Please read the INSTALL file to perform the build. The current system is only supported on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows. However the software will work only in 64-bit mode and hence you will need a 64-bit capable operating system to compile and run it.
- License ===========
The software license is GNU General Public License version 3. You can find the license in the COPYRIGHT file of the source code.
- API Documentation ====================
The API documentation can be found in the docs/ directory or on the website http://selectiveintellect.com/wisecracker.html
- Current Stable Version ==========================
The current stable version is 1.0.
- Technical Details and Usage ================================
This information can be downloaded from http://selectiveintellect.com/wisecracker_whitepaper.pdf or can be taken from the docs/ directory of the source code.
- Final Comments ================
We understand that the software might be deficient in some aspects, but software evolves and so will Wisecracker.
Thanks for trying it out.