Password cracking in the cloud

Passware Kit Forensic is commercial software that enables users to harness the power of cloud computing to accelerate password recovery. It allows the use of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud for accelerated password recovery, without the need to buy hardware.

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 11 times. Using all of the eight Clusters, Passware Kit Forensic is more than 80 times faster and provides a password recovery speed of over 30,000 passwords per second (the actual speed depends significantly on the Internet connection speed).

Passware Kit Forensic recovers 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.