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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

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24 alternatives to I Dedicated 4 Years to Mastering Offline Password Cracking

Hi everyone, I am Bojta Lepenye, and first of all, I want to thank the core developers of Hashcat. In my experience, it is quite literally the most capable tool available for offline password cracking across a wide range of use cases. I have spent the last 4 years (from age 14 to 18) extensively working with Hashcat and the tools surrounding it, and I have documented what I have learned throughout that time (since January 18, 2022) in my first book. During that period, I also had to continuously update and rewrite major sections as the field evolved. One example was the introduction of GPU…

This is a book documenting four years of hands-on experience with offline password cracking tools and techniques, written by Bojta Lepenye from age 14 to 18. It covers extensive work with Hashcat and related tools… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Long-simmering side project that is finally ready to see the light. HAMTs are a cool persistent data structure and implementing one has been a lot of fun. Beyond the code, there is likely some value in the extensive and largely complete implementation docs; basic benchmarks are linked in the README, too. Kind of aiming to be "the libavl for HAMTs". That is obviously a high and aspirational bar but a distinct possibility if it stirs up a little interest and/or contribution. Anyways, it's time for this to go out, collect feedback and maybe even some use outside of toy projects. Let me…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Population based metaheuristic for password cracking. Siga(Simple genetic algorithm) - lyle-nel/siga

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    I built LocalGPT over 4 nights as a Rust reimagining of the OpenClaw assistant pattern (markdown-based persistent memory, autonomous heartbeat tasks, skills system). It compiles to a single ~27MB binary — no Node.js, Docker, or Python required. Key features: - Persistent memory via markdown files (MEMORY, HEARTBEAT, SOUL markdown files) — compatible with OpenClaw's format - Full-text search (SQLite FTS5) + semantic search (local embeddings, no API key needed) - Autonomous heartbeat runner that checks tasks on a configurable interval - CLI + web interface + desktop GUI - Multi-provider:…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4KA
  5. 5

    Free password manager that you can keep for yourself in a single HTML file. Client side AES encryption, trust no one policy, off the grid password manager. Take full control of your data online or offline.

    2021 · passpilot.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    This is an educational reference implementation showing how to build reasonably secure, standards-compliant authentication from first principles on Cloudflare Workers. Stack: Hono, Turso (libSQL), PBKDF2-SHA384 + normalization + common-password checks, JWT access + refresh tokens with revocation support, HTTP-only SameSite cookies, device tracking. It's deliberately minimal — no OAuth, no passkeys, no magic links, no rate limiting — because the goal is clarity and auditability. I wrote it mainly to deeply understand edge-runtime auth constraints and to have a clean Apache-2.0 example that…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    b.lock▲84

    Blockchain-powered password manager

    2018 · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    A simple, stateless password manager for Chrome

    2014 · chromewebstore.google.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Using serverless functions to provide an API for checking potential passwords against an enormous corpus of passwords leaked from security breaches. - jthomas/serverless-pwned-passwords

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10KA

    Hi HN, I made Keepr, a simple offline CLI password manager for developers who prefer keeping secrets local and working entirely in the terminal. Everything is stored in an encrypted SQLCipher database, protected by a master password. A time-limited session keeps the vault unlocked while you work, so you don’t need to re-enter the password constantly. Keepr never touches the network. It includes commands to add, view, search, update, and delete entries, plus a secure password generator and clipboard support. Technical details: - AES-256 via SQLCipher - PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 (1.2M iterations) for…

    Nov 2025 · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    a fast password wordlist generator, Smartlist creation and password hybrid-mask analysis tool written in pure safe Rust - shmuelamar/cracken

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    ⚡ Pure-Rust WebGPU inference engine — OpenAI-API compatible, GGUF native, runs on any GPU. No Python. No llama.cpp. Single binary. - Michael-A-Kuykendall/shimmy

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Show HN: What I learned building a local-only password manager (PassForgePro) Hi HN, I built PassForgePro as a learning project to better understand password manager design, local-first security, and common cryptographic pitfalls. The goal was not to replace mature tools like Bitwarden or KeePass, but to explore: * how a local-only, zero-knowledge style design can work * key derivation with PBKDF2 and encrypted SQLite vaults (AES-256-GCM) * handling sensitive data in memory and clipboard cleanup * defining a realistic threat model and its limitations This project is experimental and…

    Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    over this weekend myself and two of my friends took part in a hackathon and built this side-project. we have been diving into computer-use recently and developed an sdk to make it easy to implement for devs like us. one feature we were missing though, was the agent being able to log into services. anthropic understandably blocks this capability with their guardrails, and you wouldn't want your credentials to end up in any model context anyways. so we added a keychain service to the vm that the agent is using. it was built using the pass cli (https://www.passwordstore.org/).…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    A simple re-implementation of Google's sparsehash as a learning excercise. - qpfiffer/Simple-Sparsehash

    2015 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    A password strength checker I built in my spare time. It's 100% free, 100% client side (your pwd never leaves your browser) and 100% anonymous. The idea behind it was to convince the younger people in the family (and friends) to use better passwords using a fun interface. Please check it out. Any feedback is welcome.

    2025 · passwordcat.top · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    An Evaluation of Linear Probing Hashtable Algorithms - senderista/hashtable-benchmarks

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Blockchain-powered password manager. Contribute to BlockProject/b-lock development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19LL

    I've been developing SpiderFoot (an OSINT/recon tool) for 10 years now, so wanted to share my story and try to distill some lessons learned in the hope they might be helpful to others here who might be considering writing/open-sourcing their own tools. Here's the post: https://medium.com/@micallst/lessons-learned-from-my-10-year-open-source-project-4a4c8c2b4f64 And the repo if you want to check it out: https://github.com/smicallef/spiderfoot -- TL;DR version of lessons from the post.. Lesson 1: Writing open source software can be very…

    2022 · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Learn about the time-based one-time password algorithm using a credit-card-sized, Arduino-based game device and Okta Verify for MFA.

    2018 · developer.okta.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    SHA256 sentence: discover a SHA256 checksum that matches a sentence's description of hex digit words. - joelparkerhenderson/sha256-sentence

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22A7

    Hey HN, A long time ago, due to the lack of viable solutions with E2EE and offline-first syncing, I decided to dedicate my time to making one (which has its own story: https://yaad.one/blog/yaad-story). In the course of ~3 years, I developed a knowledge management app with these primary features: - Primitives: Notes, Tasks, Contacts - Grouping with "Boxes" - Offline-first - Multiplatform; currently available for Android, Windows (x64), macOS, and Linux (ARM). - Fully end-to-end encrypted (AES-256-GCM) - 13 Languages, 8 calendar systems - Light & dark mode Last night, I…

    2024 · yaad.one · its alternatives →

  23. 23IB

    Hi HN, For the last 18 months, I've been working solo on building a completely independent search engine from scratch. Today, I'm opening it up for beta testing and would love to get your feedback. The project powers two public sites from the same 2-billion-page index: Searcha.Page: A session-aware search engine that uses a persistent browser key (not a cookie) for better context. Seek.Ninja: A 100% stateless, privacy-first version with no identifiers at all. The entire stack is self-hosted on a single ~$4k bare-metal EPYC server in my laundry room (no cloud, no VC funding). The search…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    I built SecretMemoryLocker (https://secretmemorylocker.com), a file encryption tool that generates keys dynamically from your answers to personal questions instead of using a static master password. This makes offline brute-force attacks much more difficult. Think of it as a password manager that meets mnemonic seed recovery, but without storing any sensitive keys on disk. Why? I kept losing master passwords and wanted a solution that wasn't tied to a single point of failure. I also wanted to create a "digital legacy" that my family could access only under specific conditions. The…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

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