Yesterday, 10:11 PM
Welcome to hashcat v8.0.0!
Download binaries and source code from hashcat or from GitHub
We're proud to announce the release of hashcat v8.0.0. This is the largest update in the history of hashcat. No earlier release changed as many files, and no earlier release collected as many changelog entries.
The full writeup is about 17,000 words, much more than a single post here can hold.
If you have an hour, here's the writeup: Full Release Notes and detailed writeup
If you are upgrading an existing setup, please read section 5, "Before You Upgrade", first.
Here's a quick summary:
- 11 major features and four new attack-modes
- 146 new hash-modes and 306 bug fixes
- 4,091 files changed, with 439,469 lines added and 229,313 deleted
- Contributions from 63 people, 43 of them first-time contributors
Major New Features
- PCFG Attacks (-a 4): Probabilistic attacks that try the most likely passwords first, from a grammar trained on real passwords. Narrow them with a mask, or feed them hints about one person. Hashcat can seek anywhere in their keyspace, so they finally work in distributed setups.
- Hash Recipes (-m 4000): Describe a custom hash on the command line, such as --hash-recipe 'md5(md5(salt) . pass)', and crack it at GPU speed. No need to wait for someone to write a hash-mode for it.
- FPGA Support (-m 75000): For the first time, hashcat runs on FPGAs, starting with bcrypt on seven types of boards. These boards run right next to your GPUs.
- Table Attacks (-a 5): The table attack is back, under its original attack-mode number from hashcat-legacy.
- Wordlists in Masks (-a 12): Place a word anywhere in a mask with ?w, and a word from a second wordlist with ?q.
- Rules in Every Attack-Mode: Rule files given with -r now work in combinator, brute-force, PCFG, table and hybrid attacks as well.
- Account-Aware Association (-a 9): Hashcat reads the words for each hash directly from the hash file, so you no longer have to build the wordlist yourself.
- Feed Plugins (-a 8): Candidate generators run as plugins, with full support for keyspace, work distribution, restore and status.
- Lookup (--lookup): Find out whether an attack reaches a given password, and at which point, without running the attack.
Large-Scale and Distributed Work
- Seekable wordlists: a seek database lets every device start near its range, including inside xz and zstd compressed wordlists
- Many wordlists, one keyspace: --skip, --limit and --keyspace now work with wordlist directories, mask files and --increment
- A new brain server database, and a way to fill the brain from an earlier attack
- Large hash lists are loaded using every CPU core. A list of 5 million salted hashes now loads in 1.2 seconds instead of 7 seconds
- Memory budgets per process for shared machines, with HASHCAT_DEVICE_MEM_LIMIT and HASHCAT_HOST_MEM_LIMIT
New Algorithm Support
- 146 new hash-modes, including yescrypt, Kerberos 5 etype 3, FreeBSD GELI, OpenBSD softraid, Google fscrypt, KDE KWallet, OpenSSH bcrypt-pbkdf, BIP39 passphrases, MSSQL (2025) and iClass
- 91 of them are raw hash-modes for the new hash functions introduced through hash recipes, from 40084 to 40175
- 26 new hash primitives
- Eight new tools to extract hashes
- The 74 hash-modes that run only as a stored recipe now have numbers from 40009 to 40082. The old numbers still work
Performance Improvements
- A new autotune that starts from what the device reports instead of trying every launch size. With a file of 200 masks, it takes 4 seconds instead of 243 seconds
- Small wordlists with many rules now keep every device busy. On two RTX 4090 cards, a mode 12700 run with 50,000 words and 150,000 rules finishes in 17 seconds instead of 60 seconds
- Optimizations to individual hash-modes, including:
- PKZIP: 13.8x (RTX 4090), 12.1x (Arc A770), 4.4x (RX 7900 XTX)
- Raw private keys: 32x to 58x (RTX 4090, RX 7900 XTX, Arc A770)
- Radmin3: 11x (RTX 4090), 8.2x (RX 7900 XTX)
- NetNTLMv1: 2.9x to 3.8x (Metal)
- LM: 8.7x (Arc A770)
- RACF KDFAES: 10.9x (Arc A770)
- PKZIP: 13.8x (RTX 4090), 12.1x (Arc A770), 4.4x (RX 7900 XTX)
- Less memory spent on buffers that were never used
Backends and Platforms
- Metal 4 (Apple): Used on Apple Silicon Macs with macOS 26, with cached pipelines. Builds on Apple Silicon are now native arm64 by default
- Mesa rusticl (AMD): Hashcat now runs on AMD GPUs under the open source OpenCL driver provided by Mesa
- Shared core library: Hashcat is now built as libhashcat, which the modules, bridges and feeds link to. This makes it much easier to package
Before You Upgrade
- --restore now prints the stored command instead of running it (CVE-2026-68766)
- The brain protocol moved to version 2. Upgrade the clients and the server together
- Custom plugins built for v7.1.2 need porting and a rebuild
- -w is accepted but ignored. Every run uses the former workload profile 3
- Mode 72000 is removed. Use mode 73000
- Hashcat exits with -2 for user errors, distinct from the generic -1
See section 5 of the release notes for the full list.
Bug Fixes
- 306 fixed bugs, 64 of them memory safety fixes, most of them in the hash parsers
- Several fixes for passwords that older versions missed, for example in WPA, SAP, NTLM and Argon2. If you attacked one of these hash-modes with v7, it may be worth running the attack again
Final Words
Hashcat v8.0.0 brings several major features, and honestly, they could have filled several releases. They all came in at the same time, and at a pace that left no room to slow down for a release in between.
If I had to name the most important ones, it would be PCFG and hash recipes. Both are for the users, not for the developers. PCFG is most likely what you will start once your wordlist and rule attacks are exhausted. And with hash recipes, hashcat no longer supports "only" 700 hash-modes. It supports an unlimited number of them.
I want to sincerely thank all contributors, testers, and supporters who helped bring this release to life. You know who you are. Thank you.
