The days of having difficulty cracking passwords quickly due to a lack of horse power are firmly in the rear view mirror. Now, just rent what you need.
From Stack Smashing:
As of today, Amazon EC2 is providing what they call “Cluster GPU Instances”: An instance in the Amazon cloud that provides you with the power of two NVIDIA Tesla “Fermi” M2050 GPUs. The exact specifications look like this:
22 GB of memory
33.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 x Intel Xeon X5570, quad-core “Nehalem” architecture)
2 x NVIDIA Tesla “Fermi” M2050 GPUs
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Very High (10 Gigabit Ethernet)
API name: cg1.4xlargeGPUs are known to be the best hardware accelerator for cracking passwords, so I decided to give it a try: How fast can this instance type be used to crack SHA1 hashes?
Crazy to think what you could accomplish these days. So, what did he manage to accomplish exactly?
From The Register:
What used to be the stuff of distributed computing projects with worldwide participants that took many months to bear fruit can now be done by a lone individuals in minutes and using rentable resources that cost the same price as a morning coffee to carry out the trick. Roth’s proof-of-concept exercise cost just $2. This was the amount needed to hire a bank of powerful graphics processing units to carry out the required number-crunching using the Cuda-Multiforcer.
Two dollars? Geez.
(Image used under CC from Simon Lieschke)
