engadget.com — Russian outfit Elcomsoft has just filed for a US patent which leverages GPUs to crack passwords. Their approach harnesses the massively parallel processing capabilities of modern graphics cards to make minced-meat of corporate-strength password protection.
Oct 24, 2007 View in Crawl 4
zeitaOct 24, 2007
Not gonna lie, from a Hacker/Modder stand point pretty cool, from a security techs stand point, pretty scary.
xkorbinOct 24, 2007
The first sentence was admirable, as those are good things. The last sentence is not cool.
illusiononlineOct 25, 2007
I believe it was passport as well.It also made an appearance in Uplink: Hacker Elite.I remember giving that to a friend across the street and he thought it was real because it showed his IP address. He had little knowledge of computers, but thought he was hacking. He freaked when he got caught.
dignationOct 25, 2007
rainbowcrack
wacerOct 25, 2007
You don't understand that the data from the biometrics still has to be stored on the system (hash etc.) It might help some but not as good as you think.
razishabanOct 25, 2007
pussy
akirholOct 27, 2007
The article is a bit misleading... you can crack a vista password in 3-5 days that would normally take 2 months. Super. But look at the press release from elcomsoft and how they come to these numbers... they only consider a password that is 8 characters in length using only upper and lower case letters. Not even numbers are considered, nevermind special chars.By the same calculations arriving at 61 days [2 months] for their example of 10,000,000 passwords tested per second, a 10 character password using alphanumeric as well as the special characters assigned to the number keys only [that's only 10 special chars], the time to crack would be roughly 11,800 YEARS, which is dramatically reduced using the GPU as well... to 474 years. Whoopdeedo. And what if we include all 32 special characters included on the standard US keyboard? 171,000 years using the CPU only, 6,800 years with the GPU. Wow, what an improvement. And this is only a 10 character password. 11 characters = 642,200 years with GPU power, 12 characters = over 60,000,000 years. Are we getting the point yet?Simple solution to those worried about their computer sercurity: use a more complex password than 8 characters long with only alpha characters. If you aren't, you deserve to have your PC hacked anyways.