Update: New 25 GPU Monster Devours Passwords In Seconds

[ShyWriter]

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Update: New 25 GPU Monster Devours Passwords In Seconds

December 4, 2012 7:12 pm

Editor’s note: I’ve updated the article with some new (and in some cases) clarifying detail from Jeremi. I’ve left changes in where they were made. The biggest changes: 1) an updated link to slides 2) clarifying that VCL refers to Virtual OpenCL and 3) that the quote regarding 14char passwords falling in 6 minutes was for LM encrypted – not NTLM encrypted passwords. Long (8 char) NTLM passwords would take much longer…around 5.5 hours. - Paul

There needs to be some kind of Moore’s law analog to capture the tremendous advances in the speed of password cracking operations. Just within the last five years, there’s been an explosion in innovation in this ancient art, as researchers have realized that they can harness specialized silicon and cloud based computing pools to quickly and efficiently break passwords.

Gosney’s set-up uses a pool of 25 virtual AMD

GPUs to brute force even very strong passwords.

A presentation at the Passwords^12 Conference in Oslo, Norway (slides available here - PDF), has moved the goalposts, again. Speaking on Monday, researcher Jeremi Gosney (a.k.a epixoip) demonstrated a rig that leveraged the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) framework and a technology known as Virtual OpenCL Open Cluster (VCL) to run the HashCat password cracking program across a cluster of five, 4U servers equipped with 25 AMD Radeon GPUs and communicating at 10 Gbps and 20 Gbps over Infiniband switched fabric.

Read this very interesting article in its entirety at:

http://securityledger.com/new-25-gpu-monster-devours-passwords-in-seconds/

Steve

[GT500]

That's a lot of money to spend just to crack passwords...

[mountaintree16]

Good grief!

I agree Arthur.

[AdvancedSetup]

Well some of the video cards are discontinued but the cost for video cards alone is in the ball park of about $10,000

25 AMD Radeon GPUs

10x HD 7970

4x HD 5970 (dual GPU)

3x HD 6990 (dual GPU)

1x HD 5870

4x SDR Infiniband interconnect

7kW of electricity

5 x 4U Servers (these appear to be custom - not off the shelf units) price ???

A server class chassis and motherboard are normally at least about $1,500 to $2,000 for the cheap of the cheap.

So potentially another $10K +

But if you can sell, lease out that power it can easily pay for itself quickly.

Many people want that kind of power but willing to pay for it is often another story.