How to identify and crack a Keccak-256 hash

Keccak-256 is a raw / unsalted hash type. It is fast and typically unsalted, which makes weak passwords recoverable quickly on consumer GPU hardware. This page shows how to recognise it and the exact commands to attack it.

All identification runs locally in WebAssembly. The commands below write the hash to a local file on your machine — nothing is sent to this site.

Identifying the hash

The hash identifier on the home page detects Keccak-256 entirely in your browser — your hash is never uploaded. A typical example looks like this:

c5d2460186f7233c927e7db2dcc703c0e500b653ca82273b7bfad8045d85a470

Cracking Keccak-256 with hashcat

Save the hash to a file and run hashcat in mode -m 17800. Start with a wordlist such as rockyou.txt:

echo 'c5d2460186f7233c927e7db2dcc703c0e500b653ca82273b7bfad8045d85a470' > hash.txt && hashcat -m 17800 hash.txt /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt

Add a rule set to mutate dictionary words (capitalisation, leetspeak, appended digits) and dramatically widen coverage:

echo 'c5d2460186f7233c927e7db2dcc703c0e500b653ca82273b7bfad8045d85a470' > hash.txt && hashcat -m 17800 hash.txt /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt -r /usr/share/hashcat/rules/best64.rule

Cracking Keccak-256 with John the Ripper

John the Ripper can attack the same hash with the raw-keccak-256 format:

echo 'c5d2460186f7233c927e7db2dcc703c0e500b653ca82273b7bfad8045d85a470' > hash.txt && john --format=raw-keccak-256 --wordlist=/usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt hash.txt