[106302] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
RE: Elcomsoft trying to patent faster GPU-based password cracker
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ian Farquhar \(ifarquha\))
Thu Oct 25 12:47:43 2007
Reply-To: <ifarquha@cisco.com>
From: "Ian Farquhar \(ifarquha\)" <ifarquha@cisco.com>
To: "'Cryptography'" <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2007 09:35:27 +1000
In-Reply-To: <5c8fcb9c0710241025r11b7d8d9u8bfac3b27b57de8f@mail.gmail.com>
ROTFL.
When SGI's "stealth" DES Challenge project was underway in 1997, it's =
main client ran on the host's (MIPS) CPU(s), implemented
with a variant of Eli Biham's bit-slice DES implementation. The 64-bit =
195MHz R10000 could do 2.5M keys/sec. I was
peripherally involved in the project.
One of the things I was looking into was offloading the client into the =
VICE ASIC on the O2. The VICE ASIC was a compression
offload engine, and combined with the MACE ASIC (which had the 3D =
rendering pipeline), provided graphics support on the O2. At
the time, SGI put a workstation on everyone's desk in the company, so =
there were thousands of O2's around the company.
The VICE itself had two CPU's in it, the "MSP" which was a R4000-derived =
core with a 128bit vector unit, and the "BSP" which was
a custom little RISC core designed for efficiently slicing =
non-word-aligned multimedia bit streams. Biham's algorithm would
have run beautifully on the VICE.
I'd just gotten the devkit when the project came to an end with =
DESCHALL's successful keyfind.
So I'm feeling a little bit of d=E9j=E0 vu about Elcomsoft's patent =
here. Offloading keyfinding algorithms to a programmable
graphics accelerator. Wow, sounds *very* familiar. But alas, probably =
not sufficient for a prior art claim. Gotta also wonder
if the mailing list traffic would still exist in SGI too.
Mind you, if the patent system wasn't totally broken, this application =
would fail the obviousness test anyway. The GPU's
mentioned below are basically just optimized little co-processors =
anyway. How much innovation is there in offloading crypto to
a coprocessor?=20
Ian.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-cryptography@metzdowd.com =
[mailto:owner-cryptography@metzdowd.com] On Behalf Of mheyman@gmail.com
Sent: Thursday, 25 October 2007 3:25 AM
To: Cryptography
Subject: Elcomsoft trying to patent faster GPU-based password cracker
From:
<http://www.elcomsoft.com/EDPR/gpu_en.pdf>
Moscow, Russia - October 22, 2007 - ElcomSoft Co. Ltd. has
discovered and filed for a US patent...Using the "brute force"
technique of recovering passwords, it was possible, though
time-consuming, to recover passwords from popular
applications. For example...Windows Vista uses NTLM hashing
by default, so using a modern dual-core PC you could test up to
10,000,000 passwords per second, and perform a complete
analysis in about two months. With ElcomSoft's new technology,
the process would take only three to five days..Today's [GPU]
chips can process fixed-point calculations. And with as much as
1.5 Gb of onboard video memory and up to 128 processing
units, these powerful GPU chips are much more effective than
CPUs in performing many of these calculations...Preliminary
tests using Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery product
to recover Windows NTLM logon passwords show that the
recovery speed has increased by a factor of twenty, simply by
hooking up with a $150 video card's onboard GPU.
-Michael Heyman
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