14 DAY TRIAL // A newly patented, revolutionary crack technique is able to smash through in excess of 55 trillion (that's 52 to the eighth power) pseudo-random Windows Vista logon passwords made up of eight characters in no time at all. Well, actually in three to five days. But the period is close to nothing as a now traditional brute force attack can take up to a couple of months before coming up with the valid password combination. ElcomSoft, a Russian company based in Moscow, filed a patent in the United States for what it refers to as a breakthrough technology designed to ultimately be used as a password recovery method. The new crack technique leverages the video card's graphics processing unit (GPU) in an intimate combination with the Central Processing Unit (CPU).
"Statistics from Elcomsoft state that the new method can be used to exhaustively crack an eight character pseudo-random password on Windows Vista in approximately three to five days using a combination of CPU- and GPU-based hardware. This requires a cycle of about 55 trillion password possibilities when brute force testing Windows Vista NTLM hashes. In comparison, a conventional exhaustive attack using CPU hardware only may take months to complete," stated Erik Kamerling, an analyst in Symantec's DeepSight Threat Management System team.
But of course there is more than meets the eye when it comes to leveraging GPU for cryptographic calculation technologies, Symantec warned. Taking advantage of the hardware resources in order to crack passwords is not a new idea, or one that is clear of controversy. The paper "Remotely Keyed Cryptographics: Secure Remote Display Access Using (Mostly) Untrusted Hardware", by Debra L. Cook, Ricardo Baratto, and Angelos D. Keromytis, authored in 2004/2005 deals with a similar technique. Still, at that time, the researchers from Columbia University were unable to take advantage of the advances delivered by CUDA.
And of course the true implication is that while the technology can indeed be used for password recovery, it could at the same time be abused. "Regardless of any developing patent controversies, dramatically improved password recovery techniques that leverage onboard parallel processing GPU architectures are a fascinating cryptographic development. It will be interesting to watch for the GPU-based crypto products that Elcomsoft pushes to market and whether we are forced to strengthen our enterprise password infrastructures as a result," Kamerling commented.
Elcomsoft revealed that the new technology will enable a veritable cryptology evolution, as machines with mediocre performances can be turned into supercomputers set up to recover lost passwords, taking advantage of the hardware/software powerhouse that results through the marriage of the CPU and the GPU resources. Using Windows Vista logon passwords as an example, Elcomsoft estimated that going through a cycle of 55 trillion password possibilities would take no more than five days. The ElcomSoft technique decreases the recovery time necessary to identify Windows NTLM logon passwords by a factor of 20. This is done via a simple $150 video card.
"Elcomsoft credits the February 2007 release of the NVIDIA CUDA C-Compiler and developer's kit for providing the necessary low-level GPU access they needed to make this cryptographic advancement. The newest NVIDIA GPUs act as multiprocessors that utilize shared memory, cache, and multiple registers. The newest graphics cards utilize fixed point calculations, relatively massive amounts of memory, and multiple processing units. They differ significantly from a computer's central processing unit (CPU) in terms of their cryptanalytic processing capabilities and Elcomsoft claims to have leveraged newer GPU architectures to improve brute force password cracking by a factor of 25", Kamerling explained.