Nvidia’s GTX 1080 can crack passwords as easily as it can game

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Aren’t you glad they figured this out and announced it.
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/nvidia-gtx-1080-crack-passwords-234732303.html

Making a crack at a password-protected Microsoft Word document, Nvidia’s GTX 1080, designed using the company’s new Pascal architecture, can reportedly make 7,100 different password attempts per second, while even the last generation GTX 980 can only make around 3,800 attempts per second, and a CPU alone can only make around 30 attempts per second. This is according to testing done by Oleg Afonin from security company Elcomsoft.

Don't take yourself so seriously, no one else does
All W10 Pro at 22H2,(2 Desktops, 1 Laptop).

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That is why a longer password is better than a shorter password.
https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm

cheers, Paul

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Yup, it all depends on how bad they want your password. The video card just cuts down their time in finding it.

Don't take yourself so seriously, no one else does
All W10 Pro at 22H2,(2 Desktops, 1 Laptop).

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The headline strikes me as hype. By my rough calculation, to test all passwords made up precisely of eight lower case letters would still take more than 100 days of computing.

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That’s just slightly longer than 3 months. In all likelihood, the average would be half that. Well worth the effort in many cases. Besides which, one could employ a divide & conquer approach with multiple PCs working away on different combos.

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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The headline strikes me as hype.

Definitely click bait.

I recall reading a few years ago that some scientists were using clusters of GPUs for certain number crunching tasks. Their narrower focus makes them pretty powerful for suited tasks apparently.

ETA nVidia article, 2013 and PC Mag article about ATI, 2006.

These are the same CUDA features available on the latest supercomputers like the Titan system at Oak Ridge National Labs and Blue Waters at NCSA, which make them ideal for parallel programming

using the massively parallel-processing power of modern graphics cards to perform certain non-graphics tasks. Some types computing problems require crunching numbers (usually floating-point math) on huge sets of data. Some of these require lots of branching logic, others can be handled in more of a streaming fashion. The latter type of task is the perfect candidate for GP-GPU (general-purpose computing on GPUs) acceleration.

Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD

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The password grammar in my example wasn’t especially robust. Including upper case letters, digits, and punctuation would increase the number of possible passwords by several orders of magnitude. Sure, a battalion of PCs could be employed in a cracking attempt. But the need for this is hardly suggested by the words, “can crack passwords as easily as it can game.”

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the need for this is hardly suggested by the words, “can crack passwords as easily as it can game.”

Last time I played a game on my PC, it was probably solitaire… I doubt a GTX 1080 would have been taxed – plenty of time for password cracking between moves…

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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How about we agree to disagree?

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The GeForce GTX 1080 only officially supports two-way SLI, which means that you could use 2 of them for cracking, with much reduced times. The older GTX 980Ti (and most other GeForce GPUs) can utilise up to quad SLI (AMD owners have similar CrossFire capabilities).

You could use multiples of these machines in a cluster, reducing the time even further.

You could also rent some time on one or more (of Amazon’s?) servers/clusters or rendering farms, if you wanted to use your own rig(s) for gaming.

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After further pondering the headline, I think that my fundamental concern was that the phrase “as easily as” seemed misleading or nebulous. Perhaps the phrase “as well as” would have been a better choice.

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After further pondering the headline, I think that my fundamental concern was that the phrase “as easily as” seemed misleading or nebulous. Perhaps the phrase “as well as” would have been a better choice.

That would be no good. It wouldn’t cause a bunch of people to go and tell everyone that will listen that their password are history and the world will end if they don’t use 200 character passwords with 100 non-printing characters. Which as far as I can figure out is the purpose of headlines.

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