How a cheap graphics card could crack your password in under a second

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

I was pointed in the direction of a blog posting talking about the use of GPU processors to launch brute-force attacks on passwords. GPUs are extremely good at this sort of workload, and the price/performance ratio has changed dramatically over the past few years. What might have seemed impossible even 36 months ago is now perfectly do-able on your desktop computer.

In this report, the author takes a fairly standard Radeon 5770 graphics card (you’ll find it on our A-List under Value Graphics Card), and uses a free tool called ighashgpu to run the brute-force password cracking tools on the GPU. To provide a comparison point with the capabilities of a standard desktop CPU, he uses a tool called “Cain & Abel”.

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.

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Is AMD about to put the boot into Nvidia?

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

It must be tough being Nvidia. A few short weeks after it looked like the green team was back on track thanks to the award-winning GeForce GTX 460, a slide of Radeon HD 6000-series specifications has been leaked – and it looks likely that AMD will kick Nvidia into touch before year’s end.

The leaked information concerns the Radeon HD 6750 and HD 6770 which, if the past two generations are to be believed, will sit in the middle of the upcoming range. There’s evidence to suggest that the new series is more evolution than revolution, with both cards still using the 40nm fabrication process that was introduced way back with the HD 4770 and the GDDR5 memory that’s been commonplace for the past year.

Nevertheless, the list of specifications hints at the increased power that AMD has been able to eke out of its new Northern Islands family, of which the Barts XT core is the first representative. The HD 6750 will allegedly have a 725MHz core accompanied by 1,120 stream processors, and its compute performance of 1.624TFlops sits between the HD 5770 and HD 5850 in the pecking order. (more…)

Can Nvidia halt its current decline?

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008

This month in the Labs we’ve mostly been testing graphics cards, and you’ll be able to read the results when the next issue of Pro is published in January. But I don’t think I’m giving too much away by revealing it’s not particularly happy reading for Nvidia.

Put simply, Nvidia’s desktop department is having a torrid time of it right now: when its own chipsets aren’t faulty they’re generally slower than ATI’s; and when they’re not faulty or slower than ATI’s, they are dearer, which negates any advantage they might have had.

It’s a cyclical thing. ATI had its troubled times before the HD 3000 cards arrived, and when new technology arrives the situation may well reverse again. But for evidence of where the strength lies you should alway look to the board partners – and it’s a one-way surge right now.

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Nvidia keeps failing the name game

Friday, September 26th, 2008

At present it’s nothing more than an industry rumour, but it’s one that can’t come true soon enough. Nvidia is reportedly about to rebrand its graphics cards in a quest for much-needed simplicity.

Gone will be the 8000 and 9000 number schemes, with things going back to (kind of) the beginning. So we’ll see 100s and 200s, and all the divisions of ten in between; while the suffix letters will find their way to the beginning of the names, a la G100 and GT140.

Because that’s simple.

Perhaps I’m just being picky on a Friday afternoon, but surely I’m not alone in thinking simple would have been to do away with the ghastly prefix/suffix convention altogether, in an entirely fresh start. Can anyone even remember why a GT was decided to be faster than a GS, which in turn is faster than a G, in the first place? (more…)