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New Password Recovery Technique Uses CPU and GPU Together

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the brute-force-just-means-get-a-bigger-hammer dept.

BaCa writes to mention that a new hardware/software combination has been created by a company called ElcomSoft that will reportedly allow cryptography professionals to build cheap PCs that work like supercomputers for the specific task of retrieving lost passwords. Utilizing a combination of the CPU and the GPU the task of brute forcing a password may be reduced by as much as a factor of 25. "Until recently, graphic cards' GPUs couldn't be used for applications such as password recovery. Older graphics chips could only perform floating-point calculations, and most cryptography algorithms require fixed-point mathematics. Today's chips can process fixed-point calculations. And with as much as 1.5 Gb of onboard video memory and up to 128 processing units, these powerful GPU chips are much more effective than CPUs in performing many of these calculations."

4 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. Not so new but still neat. by jshriverWVU · · Score: 4, Informative

    This project has been around for a long time: http://www.gpgpu.org/ Though I agree modern GPU's are even more useful for general purpose computing.

  2. Cool, but a Linux Boot CD would be ALOT cheaper... by Zymergy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Petter Nordahl-Hagen's Offline NT Password & Registry Editor: http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/
    NOTE: Tested on: NT 3.51, NT 4 (all versions and SPs), Windows 2000 (all versions & SPs), Windows XP (all versions, also SP2), Windows Server 2003 (all SPs), Vindows Vista 32 and 64 bit.

  3. Irony? ("...by a company called ElcomSoft...") by ClayJar · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm just wondering, should I take the summary as intentionally ironic (i.e. as if it had referred to an operating system "by a company called Microsoft"), or should I assume it was written by someone *fascinatingly* oblivious to the recent history of decryption software and the disputed legalities thereof? An informed, non-ironic summary would simply say, "...by ElcomSoft...", of course.

    For any of you who may have been living under a rock (possibly on another planet), ElcomSoft is the company that was employing Dmitry Sklyarov, who was arrested in the US on DMCA charges when he'd come to present at a conference. Wikipedia has more.

  4. Poorly written article by Deadplant · · Score: 5, Informative

    And with as much as 1.5 Gb of onboard video memory Not knowing the difference between a bit and a byte == Fail.

    ElcomSoft has discovered and filed for a US patent on a breakthrough technology ... harnessed the combined power of a PC's Central Processing Unit and its video card's Graphics Processing Unit. The resulting hardware/software powerhouse will... Referring to the (obvious) use of a new library/sdk from NVIDIA to improve performance of an existing application as the "discovery of a breakthrough technology" ==
    Fail.

    ...allow cryptology professionals to build affordable PCs that will work like supercomputers when recovering lost passwords. Cut and pasted from "How to write with spin for dummies"
    Fail.

    ...will be incorporating this patent-pending technology into their entire family of enterprise password recovery applications. Corporate press release copy and paste == Fail.

    Numerous grammatical errors == Fail.