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New Password Recovery Technique Uses CPU and GPU Together
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."
You can more than counter it by adding one more digit to your password.
Doesn't seem like such a big deal to me.
When did it start to be called "password recovery" instead of "password cracking"?
Think Deeply.
Note to myself: This is /. so i shall not post obvious facts. Other will do it for me, and they are always faster.