GPU Password Cracking – Bruteforceing a Windows Password Using a Graphic Card
GPGPU computing is getting lots of attention these days. GPGPU computing simply means doing general calculations on graphic cards (GPUs) rather than CPUs. Traditionally, GPUs were used only for getting graphical output, rendering frames in games and other purposes related to graphics. Lately, people started realizing that GPUs are far more efficient at handling highly parallel tasks and that there should be a way to code graphic cards. Though GPGPU computing is still at its infancy, a lot of progress has been made toward this direction. For example GPUs are used to speed up video conversion, video processing, doing scientific calculations, folding and password hash cracking.
The last one – password cracking looks very interesting and we are going to discuss about just that. Recently I came across a free password hash cracker called ighashgpu. This tool is developed by a guy called Ivan Golubev. It’s a command-line utility meaning, there is no GUI. Though allergic to command-line utilities, curiosity made me to meddle with the tool to see how fast my Radeon 5770 would crack passwords and the results are simply amazing.
