Hashcat is a high-performance hash cracking software and OpenCL compute application used to recover plain-text passwords from hashed data. It functions as a GPU-accelerated recovery tool and distributed password cracker, leveraging CPUs and GPUs to perform intensive cryptographic computations. The system differentiates itself through a distributed cracking workflow that coordinates tasks across multiple machines via an overlay network to share computational load. It further optimizes recovery speed using Markov chain keyspace optimization to prioritize the most likely password candidates. Th
