New Hacking Tool Uses Power of Graphics Cards

[zekrahminator]

When Folding@Home came out with a GPU client, folding scores soared, due to the massive power just waiting to be unlocked in a graphics card. However, as said in Spider-man, with great power comes great responsibility. Someone has reverse-engineered the power of graphics, and is trying to patent the use of this power to crack passwords at incredible rates.

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 technology could be used by crime investigators to log into terrorist networks, or pirates to get into RIAA servers.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[panchoman]

pirates to get in RIAA servers.. lol..

sweet, but scary, sometimes we build things that we shouldn't things that have the ability to screw the world over.. like nukes.

 

[Jess Stingray]

GPU's FTW!

 

[JC316]

Thats frightening. I remember when the PS2 came out, the government was talking about the system because it could be used for hacking. Looks sorta like the same thing here.

 

[panchoman]

Go to first new post New Hacking Tool Uses Power... 2 Minutes Ago 02:51 PM by zekrahminator »

can mods make invisible posts or something? or did zek edit something?

 

[Jess Stingray]

He probably deleted his post before the page loaded for you. Or your browser screwed up and loaded a cache'd page, it does that to me sometimes.

 

[Nicksterr]

Heh, in this case, I can actually see the pirates taking advantage of this before any legal firm.

 

[lemonadesoda]

Elcomsoft FTW. Their software has really helped me out sometimes.

But there are 2 big problems for me:

1./ WinRAR too slow to crack
2./ Lotus notes too slow to crack

If they can get a GPU, or even a PPU, to do the math cracking faster... then GREAT. Speed up of 10-100x DEFINATELY makes their software worth a few $ extra.

I like.

 

[kwchang007]

Hmmm not good news if your breaking the law and trying to hide it from the gov't...

 

[WarEagleAU]

amazing how far technology has come. Imagine what you could do with that if you could harness your GPUs power <evil laugh>

 

[lemonadesoda]

IMPORTANT NOTE:

Currently Geoforce 8 cards only.

MAXIMUM SPEEDUP: 25x

TYPICAL SPEEDUP:15-20x http://www.elcomsoft.com/EDPR/gpu_en.pdf

It's good, but its not earth shattering. I would imagine code designed for an AEGIA board, or other math co-pro add-in, would have a bigger performance impact.

In February 2007, NVIDIA®, the worldwide leader in programmable graphics processor
technologies, launched CUDA, a C-Compiler and developer's kit that gives software
developers access to the parallel processing power of the GPU through the standard language
of C. NVIDIA® GPUs (GeForce® 8 and above) act as multiprocessors, with multiple registers
and shared memory and cache. ElcomSoft has harnessed their computing power, and will be
incorporating this patent-pending technology into their entire family of enterprise password
recovery applications. Since high-end PC mother boards can work with four separate video
cards, the future is bright for even faster password recovery applications.