High performance password cracking by implementing rainbow tables on nVidia graphics cards (IseCrack)

• Main Author: Graves, Russell Edward
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Subjects: computer science; engineering, electronics and electrical
• ISBN: 9780549996934; 0549996931

IseCrack is a high performance implementation of rainbow tables on nVidia graphics cards (GPUs). It explores the limits of current technology in password cracking, and demonstrates the vulnerability of non-salted passwords to high speed GPU-accelerated attacks, using commercial off the shelf hardware.
Passwords are by far the most common authentication method for users, and many users utilize the same password in multiple places. Many systems, including all current Microsoft operating systems, utilize non-salted passwords. If these passwords are vulnerable to attack, a user's encrypted files and online accounts can be accessed.
IseCrack demonstrates that very high speed attacks against non-salted hashes are feasible, and highlights the necessity for salted password stores. IseCrack achieves a 100x speedup over existing implementations on inexpensive easily available hardware, and is designed to scale to large clusters.