Elcomsoft trying to patent faster GPU-based password cracker

[mheyman at gmail.com]

From:

   <http://www.elcomsoft.com/EDPR/gpu_en.pdf>

  Moscow, Russia - October 22, 2007 - ElcomSoft Co. Ltd. has
  discovered and filed for a US patent...Using the "brute force"
  technique of recovering passwords, it was possible, though
  time-consuming, to recover passwords from popular
  applications. For example...Windows Vista uses NTLM hashing
  by default, so using a modern dual-core PC you could test up to
  10,000,000 passwords per second, and perform a complete
  analysis in about two months. With ElcomSoft's new technology,
  the process would take only three to five days..Today's [GPU]
  chips can process fixed-point calculations. And with as much as
  1.5 Gb of onboard video memory and up to 128 processing
  units, these powerful GPU chips are much more effective than
  CPUs in performing many of these calculations...Preliminary
  tests using Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery product
  to recover Windows NTLM logon passwords show that the
  recovery speed has increased by a factor of twenty, simply by
  hooking up with a $150 video card's onboard GPU.

-Michael Heyman

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