Russian software company Elcomsoft became famous over night when they released a piece of software that utilizied the parallel power of NVIDIA, and later on also ATI, GPUs for recovering encrypted passwords for wireless networks. Thanks to the enormous processing power of modern GPUs and their extremely parallel designs the process of recovering a password was sped up thousand fold. It has now launched a new application for recovering 128-256-bit encrypted PGP passwords.
Press release after the break;
ElcomSoft Makes PGP® Disk Password Recovery Faster and More Affordable
Moscow, Russia – April 23, 2009 – ElcomSoft updates Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery that now speeds up the recovery of PGP® Disk passwords with NVIDIA graphic cards acceleration. According to the company’s tests, passwords protecting PGP® disks can be recovered up to 200 times faster when GPUs are installed than with CPU-based software only. The updated version of EDPR supports NVIDIA graphic chips starting with GeForce 8 series and up to Quadro and Tesla computing solutions.
Effective password recovery requires heavy parallel computations that no modern CPU can provide. Even a single NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 exceeds Intel Q6600 (Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz) by up to 15 times when trying to get original plain-text passwords to PGP® Discs back. As the modern computer cases can be packed with 4 graphic cards, the recovery speed grows accordingly. When compared to a dual-core E4500 (Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz), 4 GeForce GTX 295 graphic cards perform computations even 200 times faster.
Till now, the most effective solution for recovering password-protected PGP® Disks was based on special hardware accelerators such as Xilinx FPGAs. Prices for such hardware start at $4,000 which makes them a no-alternative to common graphic cards viewed normally as hardware for gamers priced at $100 on average. Graphic chips outperform products based on dedicated hardware such as Xilinx FPGAs. Common and cheap NVIDIA GeForce GTX295 crunches 40,000 passwords to PGP® Disks with 128-bit encryption per second while XILINX-based solution comes up with only 27,000 passwords per second result.
Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery allows highly scalable performance with the number of workstations that the recovery task is distributed to reaching 10,000. “Each of 10,000 workstations can be equipped with 4 graphic chips per node,” comments Vladimir Katalov, ElcomSoft’s CEO. “The fact allows us to claim that PGP® disk recovery has become 200 times faster.”
However, current status of technology does not threaten PGP® Disk encryption based on 128-bit and 256-bit AES. “PGP® protection had always been and still remains secure,” ElcomSoft’s CEO Vladimir Katalov says. “We don’t guarantee successful recovery of PGP®-encrypted data, especially if a strong password has been used. On the other hand, PGP® users can still benefit from some secure protection of their personal and commercial information if they choose passwords that are long and secure enough.”
ElcomSoft’s patent pending GPU-acceleration password recovery is based on NVIDIA CUDA technology and was first implemented in ElcomSoft Distributed Password Recovery in 2007. Today it supports Windows Logon Passwords (LM/NTLM), MD5, WPA/WPA2-PSK, MS Office 2007 and PGP® Disk passwords.
About Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery
Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery enables accelerated password recovery for Microsoft Office documents, Adobe PDF, PGP® disks and archives, personal security certificates and exchange keys, MD5 hashes and Oracle passwords, Windows and UNIX login and domain passwords. Supporting ElcomSoft’s patent-pending GPU acceleration technology and being able to scale to over 10,000 workstations with zero scalability overhead, Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery is a high-end password recovery solution offering the speediest recovery with the most sophisticated commercially available technologies.
Prices for Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery start from $599. For more information about the product and to download an evaluation version of Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery, visit ElcomSoft Co.Ltd. at http://pgp.elcomsoft.com.
About ElcomSoft Co.Ltd.
Founded in 1990 in Moscow, Russia, ElcomSoft Co.Ltd. develops state-of-the-art computer forensics tools, provides computer forensics training and computer evidence consulting services. Since 1997, ElcomSoft has been providing support to businesses, law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies. ElcomSoft tools are used by most of the Fortune 500 corporations, multiple branches of the military all over the world, foreign governments, and all major accounting firms. ElcomSoft and its officers are members of the Russian Cryptology Association. ElcomSoft is a Microsoft Certified Partner and an Intel Software Partner.
PGP® is a registered trademark of PGP Corporation.
