WiFi password cracking with ATI and NVIDIA

Davey Winder
Thursday, 15 January 2009 18:10

Your IT - Home IT

This latest generation of the proprietary ElcomSoft GPU acceleration technology offloads some of the computational-heavy processing onto the fast, and highly scalable, processors featured in the latest ATI and NVIDIA boards.

If the software discovers one or more compatible ATI or NVIDIA graphics cards the patent-pending GPU acceleration technology will automatically kick in.

Consider that a NVIDIA GeForce GTX280 can process hundreds of billions fixed-point calculations per second. Then add 1GB of onboard video memory and 240 processing units. Throw in a second card, and you can enter the world of super-parallel computing on a budget.

According to ElcomSoft this will allow network administrators to "perform timed attacks on their wireless networks in order to determine how secure exactly their networks are."

Or hackers to crack your WiFi encryption faster than ever, depending on how you look at it of course. Best not try it in Turkey though.

Costing USD $1200 the new software does not come cheap, however it does come with advanced dictionary attacks with deep mutations and that ability to employ both ATI and NVIDIA hardware.

The mutations can be fine-tuned to employ all or some of the settings such as different letter cases, number substitutions, changing the order of characters, using abbreviations and vowel mutations; 12 configurable mutation settings altogether.

Supporting up to four video cards at a time, I think that WiFi has just become even less secure. Indeed, ElcomSoft itself states that "Using state-of-the art encryption methods is not enough to guarantee network security without a complex approach."

Certainly not if the bad guys have bought the ElcomSoft software it would seem. Now where did I put all that Ethernet cable again?