1.2. Purpose and basic functions

ElcomSoft Distributed Password Recovery is a unique network-based password recovery software for extremely fast and effective restoration of  a wide spectrum of documents.

It allows to:

- restore passwords of different documents by means of distributed processing;

- work in local and global networks;

- administer the password recovery server remotely;

- install and uninstall agents to remote computers;

- manipulate agents’ work time and priority;

- launch the agents and the server as system services;

- keep count of machine time;

- keep track of one’s own actions and look through the log if necessary;

- using NVIDIA GeForce 8 cards for hardware acceleration.*

* Using the "brute force" technique of recovering passwords, it was possible, though time-consuming, to recover passwords from popular applications. For example, let's assume that logon passwords for Windows Vista is composed of uppercase and lowercase alphabetic characters, and up to eight characters long. There are about 55 trillion (52 to the eighth power) possible passwords in this range. 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.

Until recently, graphic cards' GPUs couldn't be used for applications such as password recovery. Older graphics chips could only perform floating-point calculations, and most cryptography algorithms require fixed-point mathematics. Today's chips can process fixed-point calculations. And with as much as 1.5 Gb of onboard video memory and up to 128 processing units, these powerful GPU chips are much more effective than Intel and AMD CPUs in performing many of these calculations.

In February, 2007 NVIDIA, the manufacturers of the GeForce® family of video cards, created a developer's kit that allowed software developers to gain access to the computing power of their GPUs. These GPUs act as multiprocessors, with multiple registers and shared memory and cache. ElcomSoft has harnessed their computing power, and will be incorporating this patent-pending technology into their entire family of enterprise password recovery applications. Since high-end PC mother boards can work with four separate video cards, the future is bright for even faster password recovery applications.