Russian security software company Elcomsoft claims to have developed a way to use graphics cards to crack passwords that can reduce the time taken to discover the correct password by a factor of 25.
Cracking a password with 55 trillion possible combinations would take two months, if testing 10,000,000 passwords per second. This is approximately the length of time that the average CPU available today would take.
The company claims that it can reduce this time to between three and five days, depending upon the hardware, by using the massively parallel processing power of a modern graphics card. Previously, graphics cards could only perform floating point operations, but recent, more advanced cards make this type of application possible.
The new approach has been built into ElcomSoft's Distributed Password Recovery product, which is available with a 20 user licence at 499.
The company already offer a range of security tools and password recovery software, with customers including law enforcement agencies and intelligence organisations. ElcomSoft has filed for a US patent on the technology.
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