GPU For Password Recovery

For some time, people only understand that GPU (graphics processing unit) is only used for processing and manipulating computer graphics. A better GPU can process more data and resulting in a faster and better view of a graphics on your output device (mostly are monitors or screens).

In the future, GPU will not only being used to process computer graphics only, but can be used also to help application doing their job. Elcomsoft has filed a patent for revolutionary technique to recover lost passwords by combining CPU and GPU resulting a faster process. It's said that this combination will decrease the time that it takes to perform password recovery by a factor of up to 25.

The logic behind this idea is that most modern GPU can process fixed-point calculation, not only floating-point which is used by many cryptography algorithm. As we already knew, GPU has higher computational output than CPU, so if we can use this advantage, the user will be happier, since the process can be reduced in a manner of time. Devices are also utilized, so it's a win win solutions. VGA Card vendor such as NVidia is also supporting this by launching CUDA:

NVIDIA® CUDA™ technology is a fundamentally new computing architecture that enables the GPU to solve complex computational problems in consumer, business, and technical applications. CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) technology gives computationally intensive applications access to the tremendous processing power of NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) through a revolutionary new programming interface.

This technology could bring a home edition of supercomputer by combining CPU and GPU to do quite-complex computational in personal computer in the future. What a brilliant ideas

Source:
Net-Security
NVIdia CUDA
Elcomsoft