NVIDIA GTX 1080 GPU: gamer’s dream, or powerful forensic instrument?
In a blog post by digital forensic researcher Oleg Afonin, there is far more that can be accomplished with the latest NVIDIA GTX 1080 GPU, than gaming.
Afonin, an industry-known speaker on stages that include CEIC, HTCIA, FT-Day and TechnoForensics, has reviewed the capabilities of the GTX 1080’s Pascal architecture, through tests that has very little to do with frame rate, polygon count, or rendering quality, and a lot more with security, and real-world applications, with a focus on password cracking.
During the course his experiment, Afonin explained that the development of GPUs has outpaced that of CPUs exponentially, to a point where the computational power of modern GPUs is far higher than that of any desktop CPU available. This trend has a lot to do with good old supply and demand: serious gamers want better games and are more than willing to pay for more advanced hardware, if that means a better experience. Considering how powerful modern GPUs are, demand has been hefty and steady in recent years. By this token, just how powerful are the latest GPUs?
According to Afonin, an entry level NVIDIA or AMD graphic card is 20 to 40 times as powerful as the fastest Intel CPU.
Applications such as password-crackers used in digital forensic investigations, the GTX 1080 proves to be 250 times faster than a CPU.
To put things in perspective, Afonin explains that a typical 6-character password can have around 2 billion combinations, which would take the best Intel CPU as long as 2.2 years for it to crack the password on a simple Microsoft Office 2013 document. A single GTX 1080 will be able to crack the same document wide open in less than four days, at a rate of 7100 password combinations per second.
Even the lowest-end GTX 750 Ti is capable of crunching passwords to the tune of 1200 per second, which is still staggering, compared to Intel Xeon E5 2503, which is only capable of processing about 30 passwords per second.
How fast can your password be cracked, using a GTX GPU? One simple way to find out is through simple math:
According to elPassword if your password uses only letters, and is 6 characters long, it will take 308,915,776 combinations to crack it, which translates into a little over 12 hours. Adding a number bumps up the combination to 2,176,782,336, and using uppercase/lowercase variations increases the count to 56,800,235,584. Still within the confines of a 6-digit password, but by adding special characters, the total combinations that can be achieved go as far as 735,091,890,625, which is still a reasonably doable number given the availability of two or three GTX 1080 working in SLi mode, A single GTX 1080 would still do the job in a little over 3.2 years.
If there is anything we can learn from this, at least for those who still rely on passwords and have not yet setup two-factor login, or any sort of added security, is that a longer password that includes special characters, uppercase/lowercase variations and numbers, can make a big difference. Just for kicks we tried to figure out how many combinations would an 8-digit password with numbers, special characters and uppercase/lowercase variations would require, and we came up with 6 quadrillion, 634 trillion, 204 billion, 312 million, 890 thousand, and 625 combinations, which would take approximately 29,609.19 years to crack with what will be the oldest working graphic card ever recorded by future ancient historians.
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