New 25-GPU Monster Devours Strong Passwords In Minutes

chicksdaddy writes "A presentation at the Passwords^12 Conference in Oslo, Norway (slides), has moved the goalposts on password cracking yet again. Speaking on Monday, researcher Jeremi Gosney (a.k.a epixoip) demonstrated a rig that leveraged the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) framework and a technology known as Virtual Open Cluster (VCL) to run the HashCat password cracking program across a cluster of five, 4U servers equipped with 25 AMD Radeon GPUs communicating at 10 Gbps and 20 Gbps over Infiniband switched fabric. Gosney's system elevates password cracking to the next level, and effectively renders even the strongest passwords protected with weaker encryption algorithms, like Microsoft's LM and NTLM, obsolete. In a test, the researcher's system was able to generate 348 billion NTLM password hash checks per second. That renders even the most secure password vulnerable to compute-intensive brute force and wordlist (or dictionary) attacks. A 14 character Windows XP password hashed using LM for example, would fall in just six minutes, said Per Thorsheim, organizer of the Passwords^12 Conference. For some context: In June, Poul-Henning Kamp, creator of the md5crypt() function used by FreeBSD and other, Linux-based operating systems, was forced to acknowledge that the hashing function is no longer suitable for production use — a victim of GPU-powered systems that could perform 'close to 1 million checks per second on COTS (commercial off the shelf) GPU hardware,' he wrote. Gosney's cluster cranks out more than 77 million brute force attempts per second against MD5crypt."

Comments

my password

[Anonymous Coward]

So it doesn't matter anymore I'm using 000000 as password ....

Re:my password

[AftanGustur]

To all you gloom and doom people out there, here's my suggestion. If your password is monkeys1459, change it to monkeys1459monkeys1459. That's 22 letters and equally memorable.

You are assuming that the password test function doesn't text the pattern XX i.e. the same string repeated.

Password crackers actually test a number of permutations, like adding every digit 0-9 to the end of the string, reversing the order of characters, setting the first letter to uppercase, setting all the letters to uppercase, AND, repeating the password.

So your little "trick" is already outsmarted by today's password crackers.

Use different passwords for different things

[TheLink]

My conclusion is to use different passwords for different things. They don't have to be that strong.

As long as the passwords are strong enough to prevent brute forcing over the _NETWORK_ they are strong enough. If you don't pick an overly stupid password then either you or the site is going to be pwned before the hackers brute-force/guess your password over the network.

If someone has hacked into the site to obtain the hashes, it's likely they can do other stuff anyway (make transactions, get your info, maybe even get the plaintext of your password), so don't waste your time making and using super long passwords.

Re:Use different passwords for different things

[bmo]

Pretty much this. Brute forcing passwords over the Internet is silly and non-productive.

>it's likely they can do other stuff anyway

What, you mean like the Youporn chat registration list that had the usernames and passwords *and* verification email addresses in plaintext? Or like when Yahoo was compromised? Or like dozens of other companies were compromised? Or like when EMC was spear-phished out of RSA tokens?

My concern isn't someone with a hundred Tesla cards cracking passwords. My concern is dumb admins and people falling for social-engineering.

--
BMO

Re:Use different passwords for different things

[DrXym]

Different passwords for different things is a good idea.

But the issue is not brute forcing over the network. The issue is hackers stealing a database of passwords, then bruteforcing the lot of them locally. Some sites don't even bother to hash the password at all and some don't salt them or use a weak hash. So if the database is lifted, the hackers could potentially recover some or all of the passwords with little or no effort. So if you use the same email and password for an insecure site as a strong site, you are trouble.

Therefore it would be wise to arrange sites into tiers of importance. Tax / health / social security on the top. Then banks. Then cloud / email services. Then stores. Then sites with personally identifying info. Then forums and other throwaway crap. For each tier take appropriate measures to ensure uniqueness of the password and login id and use password safe to manage this mess. On the bottom tier, you could probably use the same throwaway password for every site, or a variant of it (e.g. tack on the first 4 letters of the domain host) since a compromise is a nuisance rather than as a threat.

And use something like Password Safe so you don't have to remember all this crap.

Re:Use different passwords for different things

[Anonymous Coward]

i think email should be on the top list of priority - because "reset your password" on every other system tends to use your email address. lose control of your email and you've lost control of everything else.

This is hype: NTLM is broken by design

[slb]

This is well known and no sane people uses NTLM auth anymore, even Microsoft recommend to deactivate this authentication method. The idiots at Microsoft used a DES ECB implementation instead of CBC that anyone with two ounce of crypto knowledge would choose. The practical impact of this very bad design choice is that a 14 character password has as much complexity as two independant 7 characters passwords ! So when the authors brag about cracking a 14 character password in 6 minutes, what they're really doing is cracking two 7 character passwords in 6 minutes, this is entirely different and not impressive at all.