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Interesting Article on Cracking Passwords on a Cloud Network

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kknaur Posts: 540	Posted 09:49 Nov 23, 2010 \| One of my fellow ACMers sent me this article. It talks about how someone was able to use Amazon's Cloud Computing network to crack 14 SHA1 hashes of passwords of length 1-6. The person was able to do it in only 49 minutes as well! Since we were talking about security yesterday, I thought this would be an interesting read for everyone. Cracking Passwords In The Cloud: Amazon’s New EC2 GPU Instances Last edited by kknaur at 09:50 Nov 23, 2010.
cysun Posts: 2935	Posted 10:19 Nov 23, 2010 \| That's quite impressive. I was not aware that GPUs have sped up hash computation so much. With that said, these types of brute force methods won't work so well if you simply use a longer password. For example, using one additional character in the password (i.e. increasing the length of the password from 6 to 7) would increase the cracking time from 49 minutes to 49*95 minutes (95 is the size of the character set), or more than 3 days.

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kknaur

Posts: 540

Posted 09:49 Nov 23, 2010 |

One of my fellow ACMers sent me this article. It talks about how someone was able to use Amazon's Cloud Computing network to crack 14 SHA1 hashes of passwords of length 1-6. The person was able to do it in only 49 minutes as well! Since we were talking about security yesterday, I thought this would be an interesting read for everyone.

Cracking Passwords In The Cloud: Amazon’s New EC2 GPU Instances

Last edited by kknaur at 09:50 Nov 23, 2010.

cysun

Posts: 2935

Posted 10:19 Nov 23, 2010 |

That's quite impressive. I was not aware that GPUs have sped up hash computation so much.

With that said, these types of brute force methods won't work so well if you simply use a longer password. For example, using one additional character in the password (i.e. increasing the length of the password from 6 to 7) would increase the cracking time from 49 minutes to 49*95 minutes (95 is the size of the character set), or more than 3 days.