Hacker Blog

Elcomsoft has released a new piece of software called Distributed Password Recovery for brute forces or cracks passwords by utilizing the graphic cards on newer NVIDIA graphics cards. From their site they claim,

“NVIDIA GPU acceleration (patent pending) reduces password recovery time by a factor of 20“

Elcomsoft lives up to their word. If you were to take a NVIDIA GeForce 8800gts and pair it against an AMD Turion tl-60 (65nm) you would see a massive difference. The GPU would average 200,000,000 passwords a second while the CPU would average 6,000,000 passwords per second. That’s means the GPU would outperform the CPU by 33 times!

We could just step back and be amazed at how well this does but Elcomsoft also allows us to run this through grid computing, so we can run an entire farm of computers at once and get even faster times.

If you had 20 computers running this grid network to crack an NTML password it would try four billion passwords a second.

To put things in perspective:

Cracking a typical 8 character NTLM hash (alpha numerical lowercase)

• AMD Turion using John the Ripper: 5.2 days
• NVIDIA GeForce 8800gts using DPR: 3:42 hours (even faster using grid computing)

Cracking a typical 12 character NTLM hash (alpha numerical lowercase)

• AMD Turion using John the Ripper: 18.5 years
• NVIDIA GeForce 8800gts using DPR: 194 days
  (if you were to use grid computing of 20 computers this would only take 9.7 days)

downside – its not open source
It costs quite a bit too! They charge by how many clients you want to add to your grid as well. One other catch is that your GPU must support “streaming processing” meaning anything older than the 8000 series will not work.

I have little doubt that we will be seeing something like this from the open source community. It will most likely be even better since we will be able to run any program we like and outsource the processing to the GPU.

When this happens we could create a system modeled after Folding@Home. Imagine if we made a distributed network of a couple thousand clients sharing their GPU processing in a combined effort. BOINC has done a wonderful job at tracking how much individuals contribute to grid computing; we could have a reward system to top contributers to use the system more.

I look forward to seeing this come alive once some brilliant GPL programmers come along to pick this up!

-Cheers