Passware Kit Uses Cloud Computing to Accelerate Password Recovery

  • Mar 24, 2011
Passware Inc. has announced that its Passware Kit Forensic is the first commercial software to use the power of cloud computing to accelerate password recovery.

"Some types of encryption are so secure that without expensive hardware accelerators, it becomes literally impossible to recover passwords in reasonable time," said Dmitry Sumin, president of Passware, Inc. "This new feature allows the end user to rent computer time from Amazon for the use of the required hardware. Users now have an option to accelerate the password recovery process without the need to invest into expensive hardware clusters – making powerful password recovery affordable."

Passware Kit allows the use of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud – a scalable cloud computing platform – for accelerated password recovery, without the need to buy expensive hardware. The Amazon serves provides resizable computing capacity in the cloud, changes the economics of computing by allowing users to pay only for the capacity they actually use and avoids the need for users to overload computer resources.

Passware Kit Forensic can distribute the time-consuming password recovery process among eight Amazon Cluster GPU instances, each of which has two NVIDIA Tesla Fermi GPU cards – one of the most powerful types of graphic cards. A single Amazon Cluster GPU Instance accelerates the MS Office 2010 password recovery speed by a factor of 11. Using all of the eight Clusters, Passware Kit Forensic is more than 80 times faster and provides a password recovery speed of more than 30,000 passwords per second (the actual speed depends significantly on the Internet connection speed).

Passware Kit Forensic can recover passwords for more than 180 file types and hard disk images. For many file types, it provides instant password recovery or removal, while for some applications, such as MS Office 2010, that feature a strong encryption algorithm, decryption requires brute-force cracking, which is the slowest approach to password recovery.

Other hardware acceleration methods that Passware Kit uses for brute-force password recovery involve: network distributed password recovery with an unlimited number of computers connected to a single password recovery process, NVIDIA GPU graphic cards, TACC hardware accelerators by Guidance Tableau and effective usage of multiple CPUs.
 

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