New Password Recovery Technique Uses CPU and GPU Together 264
BaCa writes to mention that a new hardware/software combination has been created by a company called ElcomSoft that will reportedly allow cryptography professionals to build cheap PCs that work like supercomputers for the specific task of retrieving lost passwords. Utilizing a combination of the CPU and the GPU the task of brute forcing a password may be reduced by as much as a factor of 25. "Until recently, graphic cards' GPUs couldn't be used for applications such as password recovery. Older graphics chips could only perform floating-point calculations, and most cryptography algorithms require fixed-point mathematics. Today's chips can process fixed-point calculations. And with as much as 1.5 Gb of onboard video memory and up to 128 processing units, these powerful GPU chips are much more effective than CPUs in performing many of these calculations."
Re:Pricing, What About SLI/CrossFire? (Score:2, Informative)
Not so new but still neat. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just wonderful (Score:3, Informative)
While I agree that for this to be a problem, a previous security hole has to exist somewhere, it's more the "what if that happens" that is the problem. If a hash, and just a hash is stolen, it's not exactly going to set off alarms.
Likewise, once unknown person X has your hash, it's over.
Cool, but a Linux Boot CD would be ALOT cheaper... (Score:5, Informative)
NOTE: Tested on: NT 3.51, NT 4 (all versions and SPs), Windows 2000 (all versions & SPs), Windows XP (all versions, also SP2), Windows Server 2003 (all SPs), Vindows Vista 32 and 64 bit.
Re:Elcomsoft (Score:3, Informative)
This was really big news back in 2001-2002, although I guess thats a bit too long ago for most slashdot readers, since I (surprisingly) haven't seen any other comments mentioning this.
Irony? ("...by a company called ElcomSoft...") (Score:5, Informative)
For any of you who may have been living under a rock (possibly on another planet), ElcomSoft is the company that was employing Dmitry Sklyarov, who was arrested in the US on DMCA charges when he'd come to present at a conference. Wikipedia has more [wikipedia.org].
Poorly written article (Score:5, Informative)
Fail.
Fail.
Numerous grammatical errors == Fail.
Re:From TFA: (Score:4, Informative)
Passwords are so last century.
Re:Just wonderful (Score:3, Informative)
It means the search space needs to be 25 times as big. That means the password needs one more letter.
Re:Just wonderful (Score:3, Informative)
The time it takes to calculate the hash is insignificant for a real user, but an increase of even a tenth of a second to an attacker could mean the difference between a day and a week to crack a hash.
bluefish hashes take a long time (relative to md5 and sha1) to computer because the initialization takes a long time, there is no way to accelerate this initialization it must be preformed synchronously.
OpenBSD FTW!
Re:Something is wrong with computer priorities (Score:4, Informative)
You need to rephrase your question, because it makes an incorrect assumption. Here:
Why is the GPU a processor dedicated to nothing but "pretty graphics" so much more powerful than the central multi-purpose processor especially at the things like number-crunching?
The answer is obvious if you think about it: those "pretty graphics" are a huge number crunching problem. That's all there is to it. GPU's, however, aren't very good at tasks that don't do exactly the same thing huge numbers of times. This is true of most applications. Including the applications that run on the PC to control what the GPU does in stuff like what the story's talking about.
Is it because the GPU engineers can completely redo the thing from scratch whenever they want to, whereas the CPU-designers are held back by the backwards-compatibility issues?
Partially. Modern GPUs have (I think -- I don't keep up to date) 256 bit wide memory interfaces, running at close to gigahertz speed. This means they can transfer to and from their memory at about 4 times the rate a PC can. This is possible because (1) graphics card manufacturers don't mind the types of memory they use changing on a virtually model-by-model basis and (2) they also don't mind being stuck with non-expandable memory that's soldered directly onto the card right next to the GPU.
It's also because GPU engineers can sacrifice a lot of the flexibility of a PC. So what if the pipeline stalls if all 32 threads aren't doing exactly the same thing at the same time? Most of the time, they will be.
Computer Science teaches, programmers aren't supposed to have to do "tricks" like this -- you code, and the translator (compiler or intepreter) will translate from your programming language to the hardware instructions.
So why did my CS course have a module where we learned how the hardware worked? About memory hierarchies? About SISD, SIMD and MIMD processors? Why does Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, possibly the most important book ever written on CS, approach problems at an assembly language level? Why, in my CS course, did I learn two different kinds of assembly language (one CISC, one RISC)?
Because CS is concerned with a holistic view of computers. With the fact that they are machines for executing instructions, and what can be done with those instructions. With the fact that it may be more efficient not to specify that much detail, but also the fact that, from time to time, you do need to do that.
Re:Just wonderful (Score:3, Informative)
Because putting your pretty USB stick in a compromised system would void the security of your key. Anyone can just copy it an use it for himself. You can't do that with a smart card, since the key never leaves the card.
Re:Just wonderful (Score:2, Informative)
I tend to go a lbit more elaborate:
w2tJwhF+G Welcome to the Jungle we have fun and games
So each word accounts for 1 letter, often the first letter, sometimes whole words get changed.
"Its better to burn out than fade away"
Could be Bo>Fa
and thats a good half a password right there...
-Steve