Sunday, February 14, 2010

John the Ripper Password Cracking Now Obsolete



The days of using John the Ripper are numbered. Soon, you will perform your password cracking and password strength audits using security tools that utilize the GPU cores in high performance gaming video cards.

Why?

Gaming video cards are designed to churn through metric tons of floating point operations per second; hence the common metric gflops (giga floating point operations per second.) To accomplish this, modern boards come with dozens to hundreds of GPU cores which can run data crunching tasks in parallel.

An astute reader would point out that password hashing algorithms are devised to run on CPU cores which excel in integer operations, not floating point operations.

Luckily for us security folks, the number of processing units on the gaming video boards are so high, they can provide orders of magnitude improved performance versus traditional CPU based password crackers.

Can you recommend any GPU based password cracking tools that could replace JTR today?

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