Elcomsoft turns your PC into a password cracking supercomputer (gulp)

You know all that talk about GPUs being the new CPUs? Well it's not just a lot of hot, ventilated air. Thanks in large part to the launch of development kits like nVidia's CUDA, Russian outfit Elcomsoft has just filed for a US patent which leverages GPUs to crack passwords. Their approach harnesses the massively parallel processing capabilities of modern graphics cards to make minced-meat of corporate-strength password protection. An NTLM-hashed Microsoft Vista password, for example, can now be cracked in 3 to 5 days (instead of two months) using a simple, off-the-shelf, $150 graphics card -- less complicated passwords can take just minutes. Dial the GPU up to an $800 GeForce 8800 Ultra and Elcomsoft's approach will crack passwords at a rate some 25 times faster than existing CPU-only approaches. Yippee?

[Via NewScientist, thanks Sultan]

Read [warning: PDF]

[craig @ Feb 12th 2008 10:21PM]

need to password of my mobile samsung SGH-D508

[InsertNameHere @ Sep 14th 2008 5:01AM]

OK i just need to feed my triple 280GTX's some o dis shit an ill be able to hack the defence network in like a month!

[Tom @ Sep 27th 2008 6:56PM]

Well ATI/AMD are currently making a really really BIG mistake! I happen to have an HD 4870 and its a great gaming card, but can i find any software that uses its 1.2 TFLOP GPU for cracking, physics, or any other fancy jobs that used to be CPU only? NO, none what so ever, and it's taking off big time now with Nvidia CUDA. What the heck are ATI/AMD playing at.

[loosely_coupled @ Oct 13th 2008 5:37PM]

The 8800 Ultra is an overpriced, outdated card. The GTX 280 is only $450 and twice as fast, and so is the dual-GPU 9800GX2.

GeForce 8800 Ultra 128 shaders 1512mhz
GeForce 9800 GX2 256 shaders 1500mhz
GeForce GTX 280 240 shaders 1296mhz

[badenglishihave @ Oct 24th 2007 9:24AM]

Holy **** that's fast.

[Joseph @ Oct 24th 2007 2:36PM]

I agree, looks like they will need to rename "brute force"

[Unknown @ Jul 1st 2008 8:41AM]

ya rename it to rape force

[Tony @ Oct 24th 2007 9:25AM]

Sweeet! Gotta love when MS partners tear it apart and humiliate it publicly! Long live MS talent and security!

[phenom @ Oct 24th 2007 10:13AM]

You know people hacked the iphones encryption within days of it coming out, so I dont know what you're cheering about.

[fuzzy @ Oct 24th 2007 10:21AM]

You know that NTLMv2 hashes use RC5, right?

[fuzzy @ Oct 24th 2007 10:54AM]

Err... MD5. What am I saying?

[L. Cyphre @ Oct 24th 2007 9:29AM]

Gonna break into the Pentagon and start the nuclear holocaust, brb.

[Josh @ Oct 24th 2007 12:27PM]

Could probably get away with an 8400GS for that one... saw one on sale for $30 after rebate last week.

[Fraggle @ Oct 31st 2007 11:19AM]

So can I justify that 2nd 8800 now. I still haven't found a excuse my gf would see valid for the first. I don't thinking Hacking some TEA will be too convincing. Opinion withheld to I try it later.

P.s. Folding also need to get the Generic GPU support, ATI only is disturbing.

[crypt @ Oct 24th 2007 9:42AM]

Here that, ..... Thats the sound of 10,000 System Administrators Cringing.




Oh.crap.

[Darkest Daze @ Oct 24th 2007 1:33PM]

No crap, it's hard enough to keep stuff secure now, and stuff like this will just make it even worse. Plus, I don't really think this software applies to 90% of home computers since if they use a password at all, it's most likely "password".

[Ben @ Oct 24th 2007 9:41AM]

Alright, where do I get this software???? My 8800GTX is hungry!

[Thomas T. @ Oct 24th 2007 9:51AM]

Well then prepare to shell out $1,300 for the cheapo version or $13,000 for the "blow your socks off and then decrypt the polyester threads" version...

[mdm-adph @ Oct 24th 2007 10:22AM]

...or just wait for the open source version.

[shamowfski @ Oct 24th 2007 10:48AM]

Or you could acquire the software through other means. Like for free and stuff. What?

[rockintom @ Oct 24th 2007 12:53PM]

Heh, why not use the cheap one to crack the registry on the expensive one?

[slug @ Oct 24th 2007 9:43AM]

Hmmm... Quad Sli anyone? haha!

Never realised GPUs were so much more powerful then CPUs!?! Or are they more efficient?

Love to see how OSXs 'top notch security' holds out against this.

[mdm-adph @ Oct 24th 2007 10:30AM]

As I've heard it, it's not that GPU's are necessarily more powerful than CPU's, it's just that they just process certain types of mathematical functions faster, which makes them ideally suited for number-crunching. A GPU could never replace your CPU, at least not today.

[Zorque @ Oct 24th 2007 10:33AM]

The difference is in the type of processing they do. They're specialized for graphic display, meaning they do a lot of floating point operations. That makes a GPU really well-suited for doing certain types of math, whereas CPUs often came with a co-processor specifically designed to do math for them.

[r3loaded @ Oct 24th 2007 11:07AM]

Another difference between CPUs and GPUs is that CPUs are designed to handle many tasks in a serial fashion, whereas GPUs handle many tasks in parallel. This makes GPUs suitable for graphics calculations, Folding@Home work and password cracking

[Stephen Lang @ Oct 24th 2007 1:44PM]

I guess the good ol' Intel integrated GMA950 on my MacBook will still be slow at this... ;-)

[Trent @ Oct 24th 2007 3:16PM]

It's not the floating point math. The newest version of the GPU's (Direct 10 capable) are capable of high precision, high speed INTEGER math. This is key because cryptology is based on integer math, not floating point and the DX10 cards are the first cards to support integer operations. The 8800 has 128 independent pipes, whereas your CPU has about 8 pipes per core. Not only that but they do that math in a single clock, where your CPU is multistage and might take 3-4 clock cycles to run an operation.

Your GPU can't do anything complex like a general purpose CPU, but for sheer number crunching they are putting CPU's to shame. That's what happens when you need to do vertex calculations on 100 million triangles every second.

[boe @ Oct 24th 2007 9:48AM]

I guess it depends on what passwords it can crack besides Vista if I'm interested or not. I can just change the administrator password or users passwords without cracking them - even if I don't know the admin password. What would be helpful to me is end users always password protect documents, zip files, rar files and then forget what the password is. It takes a long time for me to hack those - if this can hack those faster I'm excited.

[wrabbit @ Oct 24th 2007 9:48AM]

See I always thought the reason GPUs were considered more powerful was 'cause they were specialized. But if they can do what a CPU can do but faster then the question becomes - why the hell doesn't Intel and AMD take advantage of the technology being used to make GPUs - obviously it's superior, so what's holding them back?

[John @ Oct 24th 2007 10:21AM]

GPUs are optimized for floating point,parallel operations. You have to have an application that CAN take advantage of the GPU, and then you have to have an application WRITTEN to take advantage of the GPU. Not all applications can be written this way, and even fewer are.

[mdm-adph @ Oct 24th 2007 10:32AM]

AMD did take advantage of this technology... when they bought out ATI. *rimshot*

[Brooks Moses @ Oct 25th 2007 12:48AM]

Why not? Because GPUs don't do everything CPUs do, by a long shot. They don't handle exceptions and interrupts. They don't do "if" statements and code branches very quickly. They don't do most of the memory management that a CPU does. They don't do serial calculations as quickly as CPUs. (They're only faster because they're doing lots of copies of the same calculation with different data. If you don't need that, they're no help.) And so forth and so on.

Have a look at some pictures of the die for a CPU and a GPU. There are lots of things that take up lots of space on the CPU die that aren't on the GPU die. All of those things are important for making a usable computer, and are things the GPU doesn't do.

The technology here is really pretty simple. Choose what you want the chip to do well, and design it to do that. A GPU is made to do lots and lots of nearly identical calculations very quickly, and nothing else. A CPU is not particularly made to do that, because 99 percent of the time, nobody cares. (Except when the calculations are actually for graphics, and the CPU doesn't do those.)

[Peter @ Oct 24th 2007 9:52AM]

It doesn't specifically say if it's NTLM or NTLMv2. The original NTLM hash has been known to be weak for many years and you shouldn't be using it anyway.

Now, if they are brute forcing an NTLMv2 hash in 5 days we are in big trouble.

20+ character passphrases anyone?

[syadasti @ Oct 24th 2007 9:59AM]

It specifies Vista which uses NTLM 2 by default so it sounds like trouble.

[Nushio (NDF - Blue) @ Oct 24th 2007 11:07AM]

If you're smart enough to memorize a 20-digit passphrase, then why not get the hell out of Windows and migrate to Unix/Linux/Mac/BSD/JavaOS or anything better?

[Trent @ Oct 24th 2007 3:20PM]

Unix isn't going to save you from this. This is sheer brute force cryptology. It's going to be capable of cracking any cryptology, including military spec crypto.

[Wwhat @ Oct 24th 2007 7:00PM]

Not quite true, there are encryption standards that require an estimated thousand years, now you can speed that up but you;d still be looking at years of effort.
And there are encryptions that can NEVER be bruteforced because they are designed to not be mathematical but use a reference table, and if they make the right moves to prevent frequency analysis it's just not possible.

[slug @ Oct 24th 2007 9:55AM]

Then we must feed it!!

http://www.elcomsoft.com/edpr.html

[Sander de Regt @ Oct 24th 2007 9:57AM]

I just hope it doesn't brute force guess my Engadget comment password. I can't imagine how incoherent my comments will seem THEN!

[Sander de Regt @ Oct 24th 2007 9:58AM]

BTW I bet this software will never guess my birthday anyway.

[Jason @ Oct 24th 2007 10:04AM]

This is nothing new, and if the patent investigator does his job, it should get denied. Now I am not saying the program itself is not interesting, I am just saying I have on many occasions during the course of my job over the last 5 years seen agent based encryption breaking applications on a number of 3 digit organizations...

[phenom @ Oct 24th 2007 10:17AM]

Of course it can, Vista was just an example.

[fuzzy @ Oct 24th 2007 10:26AM]

You could do the same, and faster (but with a lot of pre-load) by populating a rainbow table. There are a lot of people selling rainbow tables, too.

Although cracking NTLM hashes is a common first app for parallel computing architectures, this idea is really nothing new. The novelty and beauty of it all is that a single (or dual or whatever) PCIe card that is in a lot of our machines has the computational power to do very math intensive tasks. Put it to work for Folding@Home or something like that.

[HineyWipe @ Oct 24th 2007 10:28AM]

And what is more scary than a program that uses a GPU to crack? The US Patent office giving a patent to the Russians to do this!

[CosterMonger @ Oct 24th 2007 10:31AM]

Of course it is impressive but I don't think it should get the patent

reason 1. the patent system is corrupt and geared towards lame American inventions

reason 2. I'm sure it will fall into one of those national security concerns

reason 3. It has already be done with other processors, it stupid to start having patents for software that are separate for each device. {but hey it is a stupid patent system, right?}

reason 4. what happens if AMD survives long enough to make the fusion

[nxb @ Oct 24th 2007 10:59AM]

This may be a stupid question, but does this render PGP useless to some degree?

[Wwhat @ Oct 24th 2007 6:55PM]

PGP uses pretty long keys by default and even longer when you elect to, it's not as weak as all that.

[orclev @ Oct 24th 2007 2:55PM]

You do know that anyone who knows anything about security hasn't been using MD5 for some time now due to it being trivial to crack with Rainbow Tables right?

[Mike @ Oct 24th 2007 11:07AM]

Can anyone email me a source link to hacking protected word files. My sister forgot her passwords to a few word and excel files and I have no idea how to reopen the files. What's a rainbow table? I am new to this and thanks!

[getz76 @ Oct 24th 2007 11:38AM]

@ Mike:

http://www.justfuckinggoogleit.com/search.pl?query=rainbow+table