GPU is brilliant tool for password cracking

While many are touting the GPU as brilliant for supercomputing, it seems that one bloke is suggesting they are really good for bruteforce guessing Windows passwords.

Writing in his bog , Vijay Devakumar, from Chennai, India, said that while GPUs were used only for getting graphical output, rendering frames in games and other purposes related to graphics, people are now realising that GPUs are far more efficient at handling highly parallel tasks. But the difficulty is working out a good way to code graphic cards.

There is a natty free password hash cracker called ighashgpu which was developed by Ivan Golubev. Devakumar used his Radeon 5770 to crack passwords really quickly. He demonstrates hacking a Windows logon passwords. He does a comparison with another popular and free security tool Cain & Abel which uses the CPU. A password with five characters took Cain 24 seconds to crack the password at the rate of 9.8 million passwords/sec. But ighashgpu found it in less than one second it tried 3.334 billion passwords before hitting the right one.