kraken: multi-platform distributed brute-force password cracking system

by do son · February 19, 2022

Kraken: A multi-platform distributed brute-force password cracking system

What is Kraken

Kraken is an online distributed brute force password cracking tool. It allows you to parallelize dictionaries and crunch word generator-based cracking across multiple machines both as a web app in a web browser and as a standalone electron-based client. Kraken aims to be easy to use, fault-tolerant and scalable.

I wrote Kraken because I wanted to learn more about offensive security and to write an easy solution to overcome the limitation of using a single device when attempting to distribute brute force workloads.

Installation

Server and Browser Client

Kraken is a dockerized application using docker-compose which will launch the db (Postgres), s3 compliant file storage (Minio), the server, and the browser client. You can find the docker-compose file in the root directory of the repository. You can deploy it using the following command:

git clone https://github.com/arcaneiceman/kraken.git
docker-compose up

Kraken’s Browser Client should be accessible at:

HTTP: localhost:8080 (use server url http://localhost:5000/api [default])
HTTPS: https://localhost:8443 (use server url https://localhost:8443/api)

Note: To run the Browser Client from a remote machine, you MUST use HTTPS for both server url and browser url. Eg. If you are hosting the server on 192.168.1.2, then the browser client will be available at https://192.168.1.2:8443 and the server url should be https://192.168.1.2:8443/api

To upload password lists or dictionaries, upload them to Minio Console at localhost:9001.

Kraken’s server runs on localhost:5000 and also hosts swagger documentation at localhost:5000/swagger.

Portable Desktop Client

The desktop client is an electron-based portable application and can be run on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Due to sensitive permissions required to function, it is highly recommended that you compile and it yourself by cloning the repo and using:

cd kraken-client
npm install
npm run electron-start

Windows

Note: Window EXE portable client needs to run in the folder with its hashcat dependencies. Hashcat files can be downloaded from their home page or here. Ive included a compressed zip file with the portable executable and required hashcat files. They can be downloaded: