GPUs Used To Crack WiFi Passwords Faster

MojoKid writes "Russian-based ElcomSoft has just released ElcomSoft Wireless Security Auditor 1.0, which can take advantage of both Nvidia and ATI GPUs. ElcomSoft claims that the software uses a 'proprietary GPU acceleration technology,' which implies that neither CUDA, Stream, nor OpenCL are being utilized in this instance. At its heart, what ElcomSoft Wireless Security Auditor does is perform brute-force dictionary attacks of WPA and WPA2 passwords. If an access point is set up using a fairly insecure password that is based on dictionary words, there is a higher likelihood that a password can be guessed. ElcomSoft positions the software as a way to 'audit' wireless network security."

Comments

I'm confused

[grizdog]

First off, does this kind of approach work against any rationally designed secure software? All that would seem to be needed to defeat this is for the the login procedure to have a few seconds of delay before it responds yes or no, and no speedup in the guessing will help. This is why we have shadow password files, right? Or have I just been using *nix too long?

Also, I've seen people using GPUs in all sorts of non-graphics computation environments for some time now. When push comes to shove, is this just about money, and that CPUs have extra features that makes it easier to run an operating system, but aren't needed for pure computation? I'm not a hardware guy, so this is probably a stupid question, but I just don't get it.

Re:It's red

[click2005]

Patrick Mcgoohan (The Prisoner's Number 6) died too.