Graphics Cards are rendering passwords useless
Kordel
Full article can be found at http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/cheap-gpus-are-rendering-strong-passwords-useless/13125
I stumbled upon this interesting (and terrifying) little piece of information while browsing the internet this morning. While I’m not at all surprised by it (I’ve looked into the technology before), what is scary is the level of development and programming surrounding this technique. A year ago it was theoretically possible, but there was not (good) software to support it. Now, and increasingly, any determined tech (even a rookie) could leverage their AMD or NVidia graphics card to crack previously uncrackable passwords in a matter of hours.
Be afraid – be very afraid!
From the ZDNet article…
“Think that your eight-character password consisting of lowercase characters, uppercase characters and a sprinkling of numbers is strong enough to protect you from a brute force attack?
Think again!
Jon Honeyball writing for PC Pro has a sobering piece on how the modern GPU can be leveraged as a powerful tool against passwords once considered safe from bruteforce attack.
Take a cheap GPU (like the Radeon HD 5770) and the free GPU-powered password busting tool called ’ ighashgpu ‘ and you have yourself a lean, mean password busting machine. How lean and mean? Very:
The results are startling. Working against NTLM login passwords, a password of “fjR8n” can be broken on the CPU in 24 seconds, at a rate of 9.8 million password guesses per second. On the GPU, it takes less than a second at a rate of 3.3 billion passwords per second.
Increase the password to 6 characters (pYDbL6), and the CPU takes 1 hour 30 minutes versus only four seconds on the GPU. Go further to 7 characters (fh0GH5h), and the CPU would grind along for 4 days, versus a frankly worrying 17 minutes 30 seconds for the GPU.
It gets worse. Throw in a nine-character, mixed-case random password, and while a CPU would take a mind-numbing 43 years to crack this, the GPU would be done in 48 days.”
End of Article.
Food for thought…
So what means would you suggest to prevent cracking of your crucial passwords? How about a replacement security mechanism – I think Passwords may have to go bye-bye pretty soon!
