Monday 6 June 2011

Using the cloud to crack passwords?

There’s been much talk recently of using the processing power of the cloud, perhaps Amazon EC2 spot instances, to crack passwords.

Why bother? A cheap local GPU will do the job.

Password Time to crack  
  CPU GPU
fjR8n 24 seconds <1 second
pYDbL6 1 hour 30 minutes 4 seconds
fh0GH5h ~4 days 17 minutes 30 seconds

Seven character passwords are pretty common. Mixing upper case letters and numbers doesn’t really help.


0 comments:

About Me