Note to PGP legal dept: I’m not going to put the ® sign every time when I mention PGP. I’m just tired; we already did that in our press release and on our web site, and I think it’s enough. No, really? Well, I’ll repeat one more time: all names like PGP are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners in the UK, USA, Russia and probably somewhere else – e.g. in Albania. There are too many countries to mention, sorry :). Why should I care about (R)? Keep reading, and you’ll see the reason.

There is a lot of speculation about what has happened between Elcomsoft and PGP here on Infosecurity Europe 2009 in London, so I would like to share my own point of view which may or may not coincide with Elcomsoft’s.

We never thought that our participation would bring such kind of trouble (or at least a disappointment).

Last week a colleague of mine, Andrey Belenko, gave a speech at the Troopers conference in Munich. Olga wrote about it in this blog. All the talks at Troopers were awesome. Soon the videos and slide shows will be available for downloading on Troopers website.

Considering Intel Core i7? Read Nvidia Says Core i7 Isn’t Worth It and nVidia calls Core i7 a waste of money first. We’d agree that investing into GPU(s) is really a good idea, especially if you need to crack passwords.

17" screen, Intel Core 2 Extreme processor (four cores) plus NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M — an excellent device not only for gaming, but also for wardriving. Get it from Sager, and just add Wireless Security Auditor.

AMD revealed that its plans a 12-core Opteron processor in 2010, and a 16-core Opteron in 2011. Unfortunately, almost no further/technical details — more cores is definitely good, but we’d like to see whether AMD is able to implement SSE2 effectively. Right now, SSE2 instructions are executed much slower on AMD processors than on Intel ones, while they’re really important for SHA-1 (the most password checking routines are based on). Or may be SSE5 will give provide additional benefits for password cracking?

Finally, nVidia’s GT300 specifications revealed! 512 cores (remember that GT200 has only 240), which means about 3 TFLOPS — can you imagine that? We’re also expecting the new generation of Tesla supercomputers based on those GPUs. GT300 also gives direct hardware access for CUDA 3.0, DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.1 and OpenCL.

There is only one way to break through PGP® encryption – GPU accelerated brute force – and that one is too many. New Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery v. 2.80.206 crunches PGP® passwords 200 times faster using graphic chips.