[Beowulf] NVIDIA GPUs, CUDA, MD5, and "hobbyists"

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Wed, 18 Jun 2008, Prentice Bisbal wrote:

> There is value, however, if your goal is to recover (discover?) an 
> MD5-hashed password through a brute-force attack. Last time I 
> checked, MD5 password s are the default for most Linux distros.

The above paragraph can be misleading: while Linux distros use MD5 
passwords, the Linux passwords are not simple MD5 hashes of the 
password text, which means that using a GPGPU to precompute MD5 hash 
tables will not help you reverse the passwords. There are already such 
tables available on the 'net, search for 'rainbow table', probably 
computed before any GPGPU acceleration existed and we'd all be using 
something else by now if they could be used to directly get the 
password text...

-- 
Bogdan Costescu

IWR, University of Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany
Phone: +49 6221 54 8869/8240, Fax: +49 6221 54 8868/8850
E-mail: bogdan.costescu at iwr.uni-heidelberg.de