Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Password recovery speeded by using GPU, redux

analysis
Jan 15, 20091 min

ElcomSoft has released an updated WPA/WPA2 PSK password cracker that supports a number of ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards. Of course, password guessing is an embarrassingly parallel problem, but the reported password guessing rates are impressive.

Late in 2007, I reported that password recovery specialist ElcomSoft had filed a patent to speed up recover password recovery using CUDA and an NVIDIA GPU. At the time, they reported a 20x speedup. Today the same company has released an updated WPA/WPA2 PSK password cracker, but now it supports a number of ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards (ATI HD series, NVIDIA GeForce 8, 9 or 200 series) and NVIDIA Tesla boards.

Password guessing is of course an embarrassingly parallel problem, right up there with 3D rendering, face recognition, Monte Carlo simulation, particle physics event reconstruction, biological sequence searching, genetic algorithms, and weather modeling. Nevertheless, the password guessing rates and speedups reported by ElcomSoft are impressive:

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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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