JTR not finding password

John the Ripper has yet to do anything for me. Using the version available from the Ubuntu repositories, I began to suspect a problem. I ran a file of hashes through JTR with –wordlist=known_good.txt JTR found nothing. So I made my own in python and it was able to find all 4 hashes in the text file. So I hashed the word 'password' into "5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99". I created a file with a single entry: "user:5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99". Ran this through my homemade dictionary cracker and it found the password. Tested the hash with md5decrypter.com and verified the plaintext. Ran it through JTR and JTR reported that this is a 'LM/DES' encryption, tested it against my wordlist and came up empty. Thinking there is a problem with my version, I downloaded JTR 1.7.6-Jumbo. Exact same problems. I even let JTR run for 2 days with the afforementioned file and no arguments. No results. Is this operator error? I also tried to 'force' the encryption to md5 using –format=md5. It just complained that no hashes were loaded.

–format=raw-MD5

That did the trick. I wonder why John can't figure out the format on his own? Thanks.

txwooley wrote: That did the trick. I wonder why John can't figure out the format on his own? Thanks.

Because a lot of the algorithms look identical, so unless you tell it which one to use the program can only guess.