Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

PGP disk passwords recovered 200 times faster with GPU

analysis
Apr 23, 20092 mins

ElcomSoft Distributed Password Recovery product updated to recover PGP disk passwords

In January, I reported that ElcomSoft released an updated WPA/WPA2 PSK password cracker that supports a number of ATI and Nvidia graphics cards. That posting has an interesting table for wireless password auditing speeds. And late in 2007, I told you that ElcomSoft had filed a patent to speed up password recovery using CUDA and an Nvidia GPU. The company was able to crack Microsoft Office documents, Adobe PDF files, personal security certificates and exchange keys, MD5 hashes and Oracle passwords, and Windows and Unix login and domain passwords.

ElcomSoft is at it again. Now it’s applied CUDA to PGP disk password recovery using 128-bit and 256-bit AES encryption and has achieved a 200-fold speedup. It can test 40,000 passwords/second for PGP Disks with 128-bit encryption using an Nvidia GeForce GTX 285.

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All is not lost: PGP encryption hasn’t been completely broken. According to Vladimir Katalov, ElcomSoft’s CEO, “We don’t guarantee successful recovery of PGP-encrypted data, especially if a strong password has been used.” In other words, if you want your data to be secure, use 256-bit AES and a long, strong password.

In other GPU-related news, Nvidia has released an early version of its OpenCL driver and software development kit to developers participating in the company’s OpenCL Early Access Program. Later this year, a beta release will be available to all registered CUDA developers.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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