Password auditing and recovery tools are fast and inexpensive, thus having one of the many password recovery tools available online in the IT department is just smart. Yet, while there are many recovery tools available, how many of them can clock a smooth billion passwords a second?
New software release from ElcomSoft attempts to crack billions of passwords per second.(IMG:J.Anderson)
ElcomSoft Distributed Password Recovery is the name of the software that harnesses the power of a network to crack or recover passwords. The idea is simple; the time it takes to crack a password or recover a password is cut in half when you use two computers. This time is shortened more when you add several hundred computers, and almost non-existent when you max the software out at several thousand computers.
That in itself is cool, but when you consider that ElcomSoft has leveraged the power of Graphic Processing Units (GPUs), the time it takes to crack a password is down to about nothing. The company has added features to its Distributed Password Recovery package that allow you to use NVIDIA cards to help process literally billions of combinations a minute.
ElcomSoft said that Distributed Password Recovery can try around 5,000 passwords per second for Office 2007 documents with a single GeForce GTX260, while regular Core2Duo processors can only try up to 200 passwords per second.
“For example, an eight-character Windows Vista logon password is as strong as about 55 trillion possible passwords. Windows Vista uses NTLM hashing by default, so using a modern dual-core PC you could try up to 10 million passwords per second, and perform a complete analysis in about two months. With ElcomSoft's new GPU acceleration technology, the process would take only three to five days, depending upon the CPU and GPU,” ElcomSoft explains.
Back in 2007, NVIDIA introduced the world to CUDA, which allowed developers to harness the power of the GPUs parallel processing power. Currently supporting all GeForce 8 and GeForce 9 boards, the acceleration technology used by ElcomSoft offloads parts of computational-heavy processing onto scalable processors featured in the NVIDIA’s latest graphic accelerators.
Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery can recover a variety of system passwords such as NTLM and startup passwords, crack MD5 hashes, unlock password-protected documents created by Microsoft Office 97-2007, PDF files created by Adobe Acrobat, as well as PGP and UNIX and Oracle user passwords.
The software is high-end and mainly aimed at forensics labs and government business. However, 2500 clients start at about $5000. If your company has a need for serious cracking power, this may be worth the money.
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