The following changes have been made between John 1.7.4.2 and 1.7.5:

* Support for the use of "--format" along with "--show" or "--make-charset" has
been added.
* The choice of .rec and .log filenames for custom session names has been made
more intuitive.
* A new numeric variable has been added to the word mangling rules engine:
"p" for position of the character last found with the "/" or "%" commands.
* Support for "\r" (character lists with repeats) and "\p0" (reference to the
immediately preceding character list/range) has been added to the word mangling
rules preprocessor.
* The undefined and undocumented behavior of some subtle word mangling rules
preprocessor constructs has been changed to arguably be more sensible.
* Some bugs were fixed, most notably JtR crashing on no password hashes loaded
(bug introduced in 1.7.4.2).

The following changes have been made between John 1.7.4 and 1.7.4.2:

* Major performance improvements for processing of very large password files
or sets of files, especially with salt-less or same-salt hashes, achieved
primarily through introduction of two additional hash table sizes (64K and 1M
entries), changes to the loader, and smarter processing of successful guesses
(to accommodate getting thousands of hashes successfully cracked per second).
* Many default buffer and hash table sizes have been increased and thresholds
for the use of hash tables lowered, meaning that John will now tend to use
more memory to achieve better speed (unless it is told not to with the
"--save-memory" option).
* Some previously missed common website passwords found on public lists of
"top N passwords" have been added to the bundled common passwords list.
* Some bugs introduced in 1.7.4 and affecting wordlist mode's elimination of
consecutive duplicate candidate passwords have been fixed.

The following changes have been made between John 1.7.3.4 and 1.7.4:

* Support for back-references and "parallel" ranges has been added to the
word mangling rules preprocessor.
* The notion of numeric variables (to be used for character positions
and substring lengths along with numeric constants supported previously)
has been introduced into the rules engine.  Two pre-defined variables
("l" for initial or updated word's length and "m" for initial or
memorized word's last character position) and 11 user-defined variables
("a" through "k") have been added.  Additionally, there's a new numeric
constant: "z" for "infinite" position or length.
* New rule commands have been added: "A" (append, insert, or prefix with a
string), "X" (extract a substring from memory and insert), "v" (subtract
and assign to a numeric variable).
* New rule reject flags have been added: ":" (no-op, for use along with the
"parallel" ranges feature of the preprocessor) and "p" (reject unless word
pair commands are allowed, for sharing of the same ruleset between "single
crack" and wordlist modes).
* Processing of word mangling rules has been made significantly faster in
multiple ways (caching of the current length, less copying of data, code
and data placement changes for better branch prediction and L1 cache usage,
compiler-friendly use of local variables, code micro-optimizations,
removal of no-op rule commands in an initial pass).
* The default rulesets for "single crack" and wordlist modes have been
revised to make use of the new features, for speed, to produce fewer
duplicates, and to attempt additional kinds of candidate passwords (such
as for years 2010 through 2019 with "year-based" rules).
* The idle priority emulation code has been optimized for lower overhead when
there appears to be no other demand for CPU time.
* The default for the Idle setting has been changed from N to Y.

The following changes have been made between John 1.7.3.1 and 1.7.3.4:

* "make check" has been implemented (for Unix-like systems only).
* The "--test" option will now take an optional argument - the duration of each
benchmark in seconds.
* Section .note.GNU-stack has been added to all assembly files to avoid the
stack area unnecessarily being made executable on Linux systems that use this
mechanism.
* Some very minor bugs that did not affect normal operation have been fixed.
* Some unimportant compiler warnings have been fixed, a source code comment has
been made more verbose and more complete.

The following changes have been made between John 1.7.3 and 1.7.3.1:

* Corrected the x86 assembly files for building on Mac OS X.
* Merged in some generic changes from JtR Pro.

The following changes have been made between John 1.7.2 and 1.7.3:

* Two Blowfish-based crypt(3) hashes may now be computed in parallel for much
better performance on modern multi-issue CPUs with a sufficient number of
registers (e.g., x86-64).
* Bitslice DES assembly code for x86-64 has been converted to use
instruction pointer relative addressing (needed for Mac OS X support).
* New make targets: macosx-universal, macosx-x86-64, solaris-x86-64-cc,
solaris-x86-64-gcc, solaris-x86-sse2-cc, solaris-x86-sse2-gcc,
solaris-x86-mmx-cc, solaris-x86-mmx-gcc, solaris-x86-any-cc, linux-ia64;
other changes to the Makefile.
* Minor bug fixes.
* "DumbForce" and "KnownForce" external mode samples have been added to the
default john.conf.

The following changes have been made between John 1.7.1 and 1.7.2:

* Bitslice DES assembly code for x86-64 making use of the 64-bit mode
extended SSE2 with 16 XMM registers has been added for better performance
at DES-based crypt(3) hashes with x86-64 builds on AMD processors.
* New make target for FreeBSD/x86-64.

The following changes have been made between John 1.7.0.2 and 1.7.1:

* Bitslice DES code for x86 with SSE2 has been added for better performance
at DES-based crypt(3) hashes on Pentium 4 and SSE2-capable AMD processors.
* Assorted high-level changes have been applied to improve performance
on current x86-64 processors.
* New make target for NetBSD/SPARC64.
* Minor source code cleanups.

The following changes have been made between John 1.7 and 1.7.0.2:

* Minor bug and portability fixes.
* Better handling of certain uncommon scenarios and improper uses of John.
* Bonus: "Keyboard" cracker included in the default john.conf (john.ini)
that will try sequences of adjacent keys on a keyboard as passwords.

The following changes have been made between John 1.6 and 1.7:

* Bitslice DES code for x86 with MMX: more than twice faster than older
non-bitslice MMX code.
* Bitsliced the LM hash code as well: now several times faster.
* Significant improvements to the generic bitslice DES code: +20% on RISC.
* PowerPC G4+ AltiVec support (Mac OS X and Linux): effective 128-bitness
for bitslice DES, resulting in huge speedups.
* First attempt at generic vectorization support for bitslice DES.
* Two MD5 hashes at a time for extra ILP on RISC: up to +80% on Alpha EV5+.
* Generic Blowfish x86 assembly code in addition to the original Pentium
version: +15% on the Pentium Pro family (up to and including Pentium III),
+20% on AMD K6 (Pentium 4 and newer AMD CPUs are more happy running the
original Pentium code for Blowfish).
* Verbose logging of events to the global or a session-specific log file.
* Better idle priority emulation with POSIX.1b (POSIX.4) scheduling calls.
* System-wide installation support for *BSD ports and Linux distributions.
* AIX, DU/Tru64 C2, HP-UX tcb files support in unshadow.
* New make targets for Linux/x86-64, Linux/PowerPC, FreeBSD/Alpha,
OpenBSD/x86-64, OpenBSD/Alpha, OpenBSD/SPARC, OpenBSD/SPARC64,
OpenBSD/PowerPC, OpenBSD/PA-RISC, OpenBSD/VAX, NetBSD/VAX, Solaris/SPARC64,
Mac OS X (PowerPC and x86), SCO, BeOS.
* Bug and portability fixes, and new bugs.
* Bonus: "Strip" cracker included in the default john.conf (john.ini).

$Owl: Owl/packages/john/john/doc/CHANGES,v 1.40 2010/02/26 01:13:37 solar Exp $
