openwall / openwall/john

Make it clearer where passwords are in --show output

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#5,074 4 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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enhancement
Dominant language
C
Stars
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Forks
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Description

As seen in #5058, a new user might not figure out where to look for the cracked password in --show output.

One way to address this is to highlight the passwords in color when output is to a tty.

Another way is to suppress extra fields (beyond field 2) in some cases - or maybe by default, unless explicitly requested otherwise (by option parameter? new option? higher verbosity?)

The latter would also address the issue of parsing --show output with passwords that contain a colon (then everything after first colon is the password, just like in john.pot).

We can also implement both of these ideas.

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Research direction

Start at the --show command/output path and compare its current fields with the behavior described in #5058. Decide which output and parsing behavior is in scope—TTY highlighting, field suppression, or both—and consider passwords containing colons as the completion case.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
c
Domain
cli, security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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