John The Ripper, Invalid UTF-8

Question

I am cracking a very basic hash, which should result to hello after being cracked. But it does not.. Here's the error.

root@kali:~/Desktop# john crack.txt --format=Raw-MD5 --wordlist: /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt Warning: invalid UTF-8 seen reading /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt Using default input encoding: UTF-8 Loaded 52 password hashes with no different salts (Raw-MD5 [MD5 256/256 AVX2 8x3]) Remaining 50 password hashes with no different salts Warning: no OpenMP support for this hash type, consider --fork=4 Press 'q' or Ctrl-C to abort, almost any other key for status 0g 0:00:00:00 DONE (2020-05-07 14:50) 0g/s 354600p/s 354600c/s 17730KC/s !@#$%..sss Session completed

Please tell what could be the solution.

Answer 1

I had the same problem, you have wrong syntax. It should be --wordlist=/path/to/wordlist, where you have --wordlist: /path/to/wordlist.

Full correct command for you: john --format=raw-md5 --wordlist=/usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt crack.txt (password files go to the end)

Answer 2

I solved this issue by correcting my syntax and adding the "=" character, as in wordlist=/usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt.

Answer 3

Some of the wordlists I have downloaded from the inter-webs have had malformed utf-8 contents. You can run this Linux command to clean up the UTF-8 by removing any non UTF-8 characters:

iconv -f utf-8 -t utf-8 -c rockyou.txt

It's also wise to clean up any leading white-space since I don't know how john the ripper or other cracking applications will deal with it.

sed "s/^[ \t]*//" -i rockyou.txt