How to identify and crack an RIPEMD-160 hash

RIPEMD-160 is an 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 RIPEMD-160 entirely in your browser — your hash is never uploaded. A typical example looks like this:

37f332f68db77bd9d7edd4969571ad671cf9dd3b

Cracking RIPEMD-160 with hashcat

Save the hash to a file and run hashcat in mode -m 6000. Start with a wordlist such as rockyou.txt:

echo '37f332f68db77bd9d7edd4969571ad671cf9dd3b' > hash.txt && hashcat -m 6000 hash.txt /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt

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

echo '37f332f68db77bd9d7edd4969571ad671cf9dd3b' > hash.txt && hashcat -m 6000 hash.txt /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt -r /usr/share/hashcat/rules/best64.rule

Cracking RIPEMD-160 with John the Ripper

John the Ripper can attack the same hash with the ripemd-160 format:

echo '37f332f68db77bd9d7edd4969571ad671cf9dd3b' > hash.txt && john --format=ripemd-160 --wordlist=/usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt hash.txt