Blazing Fast Password Recovery With New ATI Cards 215
An anonymous reader writes "ElcomSoft accelerates the recovery of Wi-Fi passwords and password-protected iPhone and iPod backups by using ATI video cards. The support of ATI Radeon 5000 series video accelerators allows ElcomSoft to perform password recovery up to 20 times faster compared to Intel top of the line quad-core CPUs, and up to two times faster compared to enterprise-level NVIDIA Tesla solutions. Benchmarks performed by ElcomSoft demonstrate that ATI Radeon HD5970 accelerated password recovery works up to 20 times faster than Core i7-960, Intel's current top of the line CPU unit."
Stop with the advertising (Score:5, Interesting)
GPUs (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Portrayal (Score:3, Interesting)
You remember that Elcomsoft was the company Dmitry Skylarof was (is?) with? He's the guy who got thrown in a US jail for something he did in Russia that was completely legal in Russia.
Out of curiosity... (Score:2, Interesting)
I keep hearing stories about using GPUs for non-GPU computations, but has anybody here tried it?
What does your screen look like while a program like this is running?
Re:GPUs (Score:3, Interesting)
To some level, CPU's have been moving to be more GPU like for a long time. SIMD (SSE, AltiVec, NEON) are GPU features that made their way to CPU's. Ditto for parallel, long pipelines. Remember the Pentium 4? That was a huge step in the GPU direction.
There are two problems with that approach:
1. Code that isn't pure number-crunching doesn't run well on such a compute model.
2. The model is almost entirely memory-starved. GPU's have up to a GB of high-speed, dedicated RAM on the card itself. CPU's have to live with high-density (relatively) slot-loaded memory.
AMD is moving in a direction where the GPU compute parts are fed by the CPU front-end. As we move forward, I suspect we'll see more of a "fusion" if you will (don't sue me) of the two compute models.
Re:GPUs (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Stop with the advertising (Score:3, Interesting)
And a bit of an and underhanded advert for ATI. 'Password recovery' is an inherently parallel problem that really likes the sort of math gpus do, and not so much the sort CPU's do. The ATI 5000 series are the fastest GPU's available at retail right now, doesn't take a genius to put 2 and 2 together here. Anyone who knows anything about NVIDIA's workstation parts knows they are not radical departures from their current retail chips so saying your new fancy retail part is twice as fast as the workstation version of the other guys last gen part is stating the obvious.
Re:Stop with the advertising (Score:4, Interesting)
As an IT security guy, I found this to be informative, actually. When analyzing the security of a system or organization, I need to know not just what is theoretically possible, but what can be done with already-existing software and hardware.
This article gives me some idea as to what attacks are currently practical (and for what key lengths).
When research or engineering achievements come from the commercial (rather than academic) sector, it isn't really reasonable to expect an academic tone. They're tooting their own horn, but they are doing it about something important.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)