Brute-force recovery of UNIX passwords on computer graphics hardware

The performance of computer graphics hardware has grown tremendously in recent years. Through advances in technology, many graphics cards have become fully-programmable devices capable of non-graphical calculations. This research attempts to determine if such advancements pose a threat to password-based authentication mechanisms. This connection is explored through the development of a graphics card-based password cracker for the UNIX crypt password hashing algorithm. The resulting software is capable of generating 14 million crypt hashes per second on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260. This represents a notable improvement in performance over existing implementations on general-purpose platforms such as CPUs, thereby indicating that graphics cards offer a viable platform for password recovery.