Cracking Passwords with NVIDIA GPUs

Although NVIDIA isn’t exactly blowing anyone away lately with their GPUs, the company is hoping to sell the entire industry on their CUDA technology, as we’ve explored many times in the past, and will likely continue to talk about in the future. Essentially, CUDA is a C++/C-based language that utilizes the GPU to its maximum potential, and given that it’s a highly optimized parallel processor, extraordinary speed can be seen.

A few months ago, in talking to one graphics card vendor, the idea of using CUDA for the sake of hacking/cracking was brought to the conversation, but I don’t think either of us expected something to hit the market so soon. Thanks to a company called Elcomsoft, that is now a reality, and the results and what the application can do is impressive.

If you locked yourself out of a seriously important file, or your system, don’t fret. This software likely supports the encryption scheme you need to tackle, and according to their reports, a high-end NVIDIA GPU (8800 GTX) can process a password close to 14x faster than a typical Intel Core 2 Duo, which is highly impressive. The software can also handle upwards of 64 CPU cores and 4 physical GPUs to work together for even faster operation. The downside? The price… but it’s to be expected.

Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery employs a revolutionary, patent pending technology to accelerate password recovery when a compatible NVIDIA graphics card is present in addition to the CPU-only mode. Currently supporting all GeForce 8 and GeForce 9 boards, the acceleration technology offloads parts of computational-heavy processing onto the fast and highly scalable processors featured in the NVIDIA’s latest graphic accelerators.