So I have a small project that I started a while back (and I mean a while) which allowed distributed brute force cracking of unix shadow passwords hashed with MD5. It is written in C and ran using MPICH 1, required a dedicated cluster and was rather not optimized. I'm planning on sitting down here soon to work on it with the following:

• Optimise the hash generator (currently slow)
• Make the source character table more easily modifable
• Enable generated hashes to save to a lookup table for future use
• Allow more discrete range of passwords to try
• Integration with PGP for signing, and possibly encrypting, communication
• And, at some point in the future, allow rainbow table integration (possibly sooner, need to learn more about implementing it)

Now some of those features don't work well without at least a coordinated clustering effort (although working off a pre-generated table could vary from node to node, some will just be blazingly faster) but on the whole nodes would be able to come and go with central dependance on them varying by some reliablity tracker and redistribution of a range upon lack of response from a node after a period of time.

Anyways, I would like peoples input on what types of features people would like to see and if anyone is interested in helping once I get it rolling again. Cheers!