The exercise illustrated that the speed of hard discs rather than processor speeds was the main bottleneck in password cracking based on password hash lookups.
Objectif's test rig featured an ageing Athlon 64 X2 4400+ with an SSD and optimised tables containing 80GB of password hashes. The system supports a brute force attack of 300 billion passwords per second, and is claimed to be 500 times faster than a password cracker from Russian firm Elcomsoft that takes advantages of the number crunching prowess of a graphics GPU from NVIDIA.
Windows XP passwords hacked 100x faster with SSD
Posted on Monday, March 15 2010 @ 17:30 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck