Want to crack a password with your video card?

Elcomsoft, a Moscow based company has developed code which utilizes the GPU in video cards to crack passwords. Elcomsoft is the first company to publicly admit and/or take credit for developing software to utilize the GPU to crack passwords. 

So how did they do it? -Elcomsoft utilized NVidia’s CUDA technology.I’m eager to see how things pan out over next 6-12 months, not particularly with Elcomsoft, but with other software developers choosing to or not to harness this new technology.To further examine the article:NVidia spokesman Andrew Humber stated that “A [normal computer processor] would read the book, starting at page 1 and finishing at page 500,” “A GPU would take the book, tear it into a 100,000 pieces, and read all of those pieces at the same time.”The author, clearly supporting this new technology, writes: “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. ” A password being a “Windows Vista” password doesn’t make it strong.  Several factors contribute to the “strength” of a password. With that being said, the author uses an amateur scare tactic in an attempt to panic the reader.  Anyone that watches prime time television or is up to speed on modern cryptanalysis techniques is conscious of the many tools/methods available for breaking encrypted files. In theory, any password can be broken; it’s just a matter of time when employing the correct methodology.