Russian company Elcomsoft recently applied for a patent on a new approach to cracking passwords, which is based on using the parallel power found inside of today’s graphics processors. The patent is quite controversial and has not been appreciated by the computer security community as Elcomsoft is able to reach incredible results by using NVIDIA’s latest GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics circuit. According to the company, the graphics card that costs around $600 is up to 25 times more efficient than a regular x86 processor.
“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 days.”
Such cost-efficient measures for cracking passwords are hardly what the security companies want, but at the same it proves the enormous performance of the modern GPUs. While the development of better security systems and data protection is going forward, so is also the technology for cracking them. Whatever may become of Elcomsoft’s patent application remains to be seen, but we have to say that it does sound pretty ingenious.
