ATI Graphic cards turbo charge password recovery
Cracking on steroids
Posted in ID, 17th March 2010 11:54 GMT
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Russian password cracking firm ElcomSoft is using the latest graphics cards from ATI to double the speed of its iPhone password breaker and wireless security auditor products.
ATI Radeon HD5970-accelerated password recovery runs twice as fast as NVIDIA Tesla-supported recovery, or up to 20 times faster than on Core i7-960 rigs based on Intel's top of the line quad-core CPUs, according to benchmarks published by ElcomSoft here. The ATI video cards also come in at below the thousand dollar mark while enterprise-grade NVIDIA Tesla products start at around $10,000.
Performance benchmarks used to come from games such as Quake, but now ATI and NVIDIA are also duking it out for bragging rights in the password cracking arena.
ElcomSoft said it was looking forward to testing its software on the upcoming NVIDIA Tesla (S2050/S2070), available mid-2010, as well as NVIDIA's Next Generation CUDA architecture technology, codenamed Fermi.
Software from ElcomSoft is designed for applications such as password security auditing on Wi-Fi networks and password recovery on iPhone and iPod backups. The technology takes advantage of parallel computing architectures on graphics boards to run brute force and dictionary attacks. ®
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