Monday, October 29th 2007
New Hacking Tool Uses Power of Graphics Cards
When Folding@Home came out with a GPU client, folding scores soared, due to the massive power just waiting to be unlocked in a graphics card. However, as said in Spider-man, with great power comes great responsibility. Someone has reverse-engineered the power of graphics, and is trying to patent the use of this power to crack passwords at incredible rates.
Source:
Nordic Hardware
The toughest passwords, including those used to log in to a Windows Vista computer, would normally take months of continuous computer processing time to crack using a computer's central processing unit (CPU). By harnessing a $150 GPU - less powerful than the nVidia 8800 card - Elcomsoft says they can cracked in just three to five days. Less complex passwords can be retrieved in minutes, rather than hours or daysSuch technology could be used by crime investigators to log into terrorist networks, or pirates to get into RIAA servers.
10 Comments on New Hacking Tool Uses Power of Graphics Cards
sweet, but scary, sometimes we build things that we shouldn't things that have the ability to screw the world over.. like nukes.
But there are 2 big problems for me:
1./ WinRAR too slow to crack
2./ Lotus notes too slow to crack
If they can get a GPU, or even a PPU, to do the math cracking faster... then GREAT. Speed up of 10-100x DEFINATELY makes their software worth a few $ extra.
I like.
Currently Geoforce 8 cards only.
MAXIMUM SPEEDUP: 25x
TYPICAL SPEEDUP:15-20x www.elcomsoft.com/EDPR/gpu_en.pdf
It's good, but its not earth shattering. I would imagine code designed for an AEGIA board, or other math co-pro add-in, would have a bigger performance impact.