Passware Forensic Kit, a distributed password-cracking solution, officially supports macOS. However, there are two major limitations compared to its Windows and Linux support:
- There is no headless Agent for macOS, so if Windows, Linux, and macOS devices are part of the same cluster, the Mac must be the machine distributing tasks to others. As a result, only one Mac can be used in a cluster.
- On Apple Silicon Macs, OpenCL is highly unstable, hence the M-series GPUs can't be used for decryption tasks by default. This is due to a half-baked OpenCL implementation (which Apple officially deprecated in 2018 before the switch to Apple Silicon architecture), leading to regular crashes.
Ideally, Passware would offer a native arm64 build (instead of a Rosetta-translated x86 one) with support for Metal Compute Shaders instead of relying on outdated OpenCL. However, given the niche use case, this is unlikely to happen. And while it absolutely does not make sense to get a Mac for passwor