Redazione RHC : 17 August 2025 17:02
The Hashcat team has released a major update to its password guessing tool, version 7.0.0. This is the first major release in over two years and includes hundreds of fixes, dozens of new features, and a complete refactoring of key components. In terms of scalability, it far surpasses all intermediate updates from version 6.2.x.
During the release, more than 900,000 lines of code were changed, and 105 developers joined the project, including 74 new contributors. All previously undocumented features from the 6.2.x branch have been combined and described.
Among the major innovations is the Assimilation Bridge system, which allows you to connect external resources to the hashing process, including CPUs, FPGAs, and embedded interpreters. The Python Bridge plugin has appeared, allowing you to quickly write your own hash matching logic without recompiling, with multithreading support and a built-in rules engine. The ability to virtualize graphics processors when a physical GPU is split into multiple logical devices has been added, simplifying asynchronous loads. Additionally, Hashcat can now automatically determine the hash type without explicitly specifying the -m parameter.
Algorithm support has been significantly expanded, with 58 new application-specific formats, including Argon2, Meta Mask, Microsoft Online Account, SNMPv3, GPG, OpenSSH, and LUKS2. There are 17 new constructs used in web services and protocols, 11 new cryptographic primitives, and 20 utilities for extracting hashes from various sources, from BitLocker and APFS to VirtualBox virtual machines and crypto wallets.
A lot of attention has been paid to performance. The autotuning mechanism has been completely redesigned, improving device loading. Memory management has been rewritten: the 4 GB limit has been removed and full support for modern GPU resources has been provided. Further optimizations have been made for popular modes such as NTLM, NetNTLMv2, and RAR3. In some cases, the speedup has been significant: for example, for scrypt, up to +320%, and for NetNTLMv2 on Intel processors, more than three times.
Hashcat 7.0.0 also received support for new backends. For AMD graphics cards, HIP is now used, which is prioritized over OpenCL. On macOS, native Metal processing is implemented with support for Apple Silicon chips and a significant speed increase.
For developers, improved diagnostic and debugging tools have been added, test coverage has been expanded, the rules engine has been optimized, support for additional character sets and new output formats (including JSON), improved dictionary management, and numerous bug fixes have been fixed.
This release is the result of the joint work of the community, dozens of contributors, and testers. The authors emphasize that preparation took longer than expected, but the end result is worth the wait. Hashcat 7.0.0 is already available for download on the official website and GitHub, and the full release notes are nearly 10,000 words.
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