v0.5.2

What's Changed

• fix issue #5 -n by @cyclone-github in PR #6

Full Changelog: v0.5.1...v0.5.2

---

c5b5d6aebbb0fa03e3c0d6879c0b060db3557ad30c79ac2bcfaa76e33633e550 pcfg_guesser.bin
8c5d92deb142a3cb4af64662c87667068b5921e8094daa38ad2b720ea0b346c1 trainer.bin

https://virusscan.jotti.org/en-US/filescanjob/ljyas4ez0w,r9weq3b8ig

v0.5.1

What's Changed

• fix: unicode handling, tweak: session save/restore by @cyclone-github in #4
  Full Changelog: v0.5.0...v0.5.1

v0.5.1; 2026-03-17

Session Save/Restore

• Save on SIGINT/SIGTERM
• Resume with -l now accumulates stats
• Preserve first_started; update only last_updated on resume
• Fix session file deletion issue during writability checks
• Faster restore via parallel loading
• Improved session path handling and save path visibility
• Add warning for long-running session restores

Bug Fixes

• Fix session save failures when downstream pipe exits early (#2)
• Address Unicode handling issues in OMEN and parser logic (#3)
  • Replace byte slicing with rune-safe handling
  • Fix context parsing edge case (e.g., pass#123)
  • Correct UTF-8 handling in website/TLD parsing

---

be0ffe676f26f93ab0625f200b146251095691d9d969d63a794aa1b52a31e1c9  pcfg_guesser.bin
14d1a6aecbd07413a9522d085cc23e8e4a16ce20f5a64368ee8a42374a6d384a  trainer.bin

https://virusscan.jotti.org/en-US/filescanjob/waz6uzl7hu,bsgjqrrbxe

v0.5.0

What's Changed

• initial github release by @cyclone-github in #1

Full Changelog: https://github.com/cyclone-github/pcfg-go/commits/v0.5.0

pcfg-go

• Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (PCFG) password generator - Pure Go Edition
  • pcfg-go is a Pure Go rewrite of the Python3 pcfg_cracker
  • The goal of this Go implementation is to provide a substantial performance improvement over the original Python3 version, while also adding features such as supporting $HEX[] input/output and multi-byte character support — which is not implemented in the Pure C pcfg_guesser
  • While the general functionality of pcfg-go is tested and working, this tool is still beta, so please report any issues you run across
  • Credits for the original python3 pcfg_cracker belong to the author, lakiw

---

Additions & improvements

• Performance — ~3× faster trainer, ~40× faster pcfg_guesser (see Benchmarks)
• $HEX[] input — Trainer accepts $HEX[...] encoded passwords in the training wordlist (multi-byte support)
• Ctrl+C handling — Pressing Ctrl+C auto saves session on pcfg_guesser
• Multi-keyboard layouts — QWERTY, AZERTY, QWERTZ, Dvorak, JCUKEN (Russian Cyrillic)
• Expanded TLD list — Legacy, ccTLDs, gTLDs (.info, .xyz, .app, .dev, etc.), and short TLDs (.co, .io, .ai, .me, .gg); improves both website and email detection
• Improved website detection — Broader URL/prefix detection (http://, https://, www., etc.) and host extraction
• Multi-threaded architecture — pcfg_guesser is multi-threaded for increased performance
• Compiled binary — No runtime, so fuss; pcfg-go uses staticly compiled binaries for speed and easy deployment

---

Benchmarks

trainer

• 1 million password training set
  • Python3 trainer: 97.2 seconds
  • Go trainer: ~32 seconds
  • Go trainer ~3× faster (~204% gain)

pcfg_guesser

• 20-second benchmark:
  • Python3 pcfg_guesser ~280 K/s
  • Go pcfg_guesser ~11.4 M/s
  • Go pcfg_guesser ~40× faster (~3970% gain)

---

Usage

trainer

Train a new ruleset from wordlist:

trainer -r rule_name -t wordlist.txt

pcfg_guesser

Generate guesses from a trained ruleset:

pcfg_guesser -r rule_name

Session save/restore:

pcfg_guesser -r rule_name -s my_session   # save to my_session.sav on exit
pcfg_guesser -r rule_name -s my_session -l # load and resume

Press Ctrl+C to save session and exit.

Piping into hashcat

pcfg_guesser -r rule_name -s my_session | hashcat -m 0 hashes.txt...

---

Flags

trainer

pcfg-go vs pcfg-python3 flags

Go	Python3	Description
-r	--rule	Ruleset name
-t	--training	Training wordlist (required)
-e	--encoding	File encoding
-C	--comments	Config comments
-S	--save_sensitive	Save emails, URLs
-p	--prefixcount	Lines prefixed with count
-n	--ngram	OMEN ngram size (2-5)
-a	--alphabet	Alphabet size for Markov
-c	--coverage	PCFG vs OMEN coverage
-m	--multiword	Pre-train multiword file
-h	--help	Help
-version	--version	Version info

pcfg_guesser

pcfg-go vs pcfg-python3 flags

Go	Python3	Description
-r	--rule	Ruleset name
-s	--session	Session name
-l	--load	Load previous session
-n	--limit	Max guesses
-b	--skip_brute	Skip OMEN/Markov
-a	--all_lower	No case mangling
-d	--debug	Debug output
-h	--help	Help
-version	--version	Version info

---

https://virusscan.jotti.org/en-US/filescanjob/n91d28op28,os9ndzj80o

40ce59745496f82862fb013191173708e17ffda1  trainer.bin
aa7823e383651c0aae29eac78ded1852e9daf1c6  pcfg_guesser.bin