This tool is inspired by pemcrack by Robert Graham. The purpose is to attempt to recover the password for encrypted PEM files while utilizing all the CPU cores.
It still uses high level OpenSSL calls in order to guess the password. As an optimization, instead of continually checking against the PEM on disk, it is loaded into memory in each thread.
bwall@ragnarok:~$ ./pemcracker
pemcracker 0.1.0
pemcracker <path to pem> <word file>
pemcracker 0.1.0 by Brian Wallace (@botnet_hunter)
Usage Example
bwall@ragnarok:~/data/publicprojects/pemcracker$ ./pemcracker test.pem test.dict
Password is komodia for test.pem
Compiling
make
This is somewhat of a short side project, so my apologies for any issues. If there is desire for this project to be further developed, I will try to allocate time.
Alternatives
If you are looking for the fastest possible method of brute forcing PEM files, you may wish to try out John the Ripper. Its little known ssh2john allows for converting PEM files to a format that can be fed into ./john. Details