What do you do with five 4U servers, 25 Radeon GPUs and Virtual Open Computing Language? Crack passwords, naturally.
Just one of the 4U servers.
(Credit: Jeremi Gosney)
As reported by The Security Ledger, researcher Jeremi Gosney created the cracking monster that's able to brute force a Windows XP (LM) password in six minutes.
While other password hashes take longer to crack, it's proof that the password, by itself, is not secure. Using the current set-up, the system should be scalable to "at least 128 AMD GPUs".
The password cracking monster versus various password hashes.
(Credit: Jeremi Gosney)
(Credit: Jeremi Gosney)
Bandwidth isn't an issue, with brute force methods "consistently [using] < 8 Mbps", "wordlist attacks on fast hashes use no more than 800 Mbps", and there was an "average peak of 88 Mbit per physical card". Ethernet latency was more of a problem, with Infiniband helping to address the issue.
Jeremi presented all of this at the Passwords^12 Conference in Norway — for those interested in more detail, his slides can be found here (PDF).
Add Your Comment 2