Elcomsoft trying to patent faster GPU-based password cracker

[Angelos D. Keromytis]

Actually, there's a slightly earlier paper:

"CryptoGraphics: Secret Key Cryptography Using Graphics Cards"
Debra L. Cook, John Ioannidis, Angelos D. Keromytis, and Jake Luck. In 
Proceedings of the RSA Conference, Cryptographer's Track (CT-RSA), pp. 
334 - 350. February 2005, San Francisco, CA. An older version is 
available as Columbia University Computer Science Department Technical 
Report CUCS-002-04.

You can get it from 
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~angelos/Papers/2004/gc_ctrsa.pdf
-Angelos

Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Oct 2007 13:25:29 -0400
> "mheyman at gmail.com" <mheyman at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 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.
>>
> I hope they don't get the patent.  The idea of using a GPU for
> cryptographic calculations isn't new; see, for example, "Remotely Keyed
> Cryptographics: Secure Remote Display Access Using (Mostly) Untrusted
> Hardware" (http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~angelos/Papers/2005/rkey_icics.pdf)
> Debra L. Cook, Ricardo Baratto, and Angelos D. Keromytis. In
> Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information and
> Communications Security (ICICS), pp. 363 - 375. December 2005, Beijing,
> China. An older version is available as Columbia University Computer
> Science Department Technical Report CUCS-050-04
> (http://mice.cs.columbia.edu/getTechreport.php?techreportID=110&format=pdf&),
> December 2004.
> 
> 
> 		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
> 
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