Recently I was working on a boot2root called FourAndSix (walkthrough here), and I needed to brute force the password for an encrypted 7z archive. If you haven’t used it, JohnThe Ripper comes with all kinds of tools to pull hashes from various file types into a format the John can work with, a common example being unshadow. In this case, I found that the version of JTR that comes with kali doesn’t contain a lot of those tools, including the 7z one. There is a jumbo version out there that you can install to get access to an increased variety of tools.
I found a pretty good guide for installing this version of John here (or inserted below), and found it so useful that I wanted to save it for future use in Kali installations. So, with all due credit to webpwnized, I’m going to copy the content of his video here for future use. I encourage you to go ahead and watch the actual video if you want to set up the jumbo version of JTR, sometimes it’s better to watch along rather than read along, and he/she deserves the views for his/her work.
Before we can install our new version of JohnTheRipper, we have some prerequisites to work through. First:
apt install build-essential libssl-dev yasm libgmp-dev libpcap-dev libnss3-dev libkrb5-dev pkg-config libopenmpi-dev openmpi-bin zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev
Next, Rexgen prerequisites
apt install flex cmake bison git
Now Rexgen itself
cd /opt
git clone https://github.com/teeshop/rexgen.git
cd rexgen
./install.sh
ldconfig
Now we can download JohnTheRipper:
cd /opt
git clone https://github.com/magnumripper/JohnTheRipper.git
And install it
cd /opt/JohnTheRipper/src/
./configure --enable-mpi
make -s clean && make -sj4
Not only can this version of JTR do more, it’s a great deal faster than the version bundled with Kali. See the video below to see how to compare the two versions, webpwnized was able to get roughly 4 times faster speeds.