Patent filed for revolutionary technique to quickly recover lost passwords

ElcomSoft has discovered and filed for a US patent on a breakthrough technology that will decrease the time that it takes to perform password recovery by a factor of up to 25. ElcomSoft has harnessed the combined power of a PC's Central Processing Unit and its video card's Graphics Processing Unit. The resulting hardware/software powerhouse will allow cryptology professionals to build affordable PCs that will work like supercomputers when recovering lost passwords.

Using the "brute force" technique of recovering passwords, it was possible, though time-consuming, to recover passwords from popular applications. For example, the logon password for Windows Vista might be an eight-character string composed of uppercase and lowercase alphabetic characters. There would about 55 trillion (52 to the eighth power) possible passwords. Windows Vista uses NTLM hashing by default, so using a modern dual-core PC you could test up to 10,000,000 passwords per second, and perform a complete analysis in about two months. With ElcomSoft's new technology, the process would take only three to five days, depending upon the CPU and GPU.