openwall / openwall/john

Character encoding inconsistency / reporting

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#5,681 7 comments 0 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@magnumripper is already working on this.

Since Mar 5, 2025.

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Description

Originally in https://github.com/openwall/john/pull/5680#issuecomment-2696502854

Testing against the test vectors from https://github.com/openwall/john-samples/pull/31 I am only able to directly crack the simple password 12345678. For cracking the complex password, I have to first process the wordlist through iconv -f utf8 -t iso-8859-1. I guess it got inadvertently converted the other way somewhere on the way to git commit? Should we replace it with the result of this iconv with a subsequent commit?

Oh, alternatively I am able to get it cracked by adding -target-enc=iso-8859-1.

@magnumripper @davidedg please suggest how to fix this encoding issue best, to minimize user confusion and users' wasted time on running with wrong encoding settings. Right now, by default we print Using default input encoding: UTF-8, but with the input wordlist actually in UTF-8 we fail to crack this password. So it feels like a bug.

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