Crypt Breaker's Workbench (CBW)

CBW was posted to usenet on 17 Jun 1987 by Rich Salz, with permission from the author Robert W. Baldwin. It is available in mod.sources (comp.unix.sources) Volume 10, Issue 1, mirrored on many places, for instance here: ftp://ftp.isc.org/usenet/comp.sources.unix/volume10/cbw/

Description (from cbw.doc)

CBW is an interactive multi-window system for mounting a cipher-text only attack on a file encrypted by the Unix crypt command. CBW is a workbench in the sense that it provides the user with an integrated set of tools that simplify the initial, middle and final portions of the decryption process. A user interacts with the workbench by choosing tools and setting parameters. CBW carries out the work and displays the results. A moderately experienced user of CBW can easily decrypt both long and short messages when bigram statistics are known for the message space. The basic cryptanalytic techniques used by CBW are described in a paper by Reeds and Weinberger that appeared in the October 1984 issue of the ATT Bell Laboratories Technical Journal.

This git repository is not meant to improve upon cbw, only make it compile on modern UNIX-like systems, like OS X, FreeBSD and GNU/Linux.

Current status: Compiling but crashing. You are welcome to help out ;-)

Notes from ebfe (Michael Gehring):

echo "foobar" > data.cipher
LETTERSTATS=mss.stats BIGRAMSTATS=mss-bigram.stats TRIGRAMSTATS=trigrams.stats ./cbw data

starts up fine, though the terminal is mostly non-functional.

For me it is not only non-functional, but actually crashing and core dumping. I am looking into it right now.