We’ve recently updated Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery, adding enhanced GPU-assisted recovery for many supported formats. In a word, the new release adds GPU-accelerated recovery for OS X keychain, triples BitLocker recovery speeds, improves W-Fi password recovery and enhances GPU acceleration support for Internet Key Exchange (IKE).

Recovering OX S Keychain Passwords

Mac OS X employs a centralized protected storage for keeping user’s passwords, Web forms and other sensitive information. While extracting the encrypted database from the user’s computer during the acquisition is fairly simple, the actual records remain securely encrypted. The updated Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery enables GPU-accelerated (NVIDIA only) recovery of the keychain master password, allowing decrypting the entire keychain with Elcomsoft Password Digger. Similar to other formats, the speeds are significantly higher when using a compatible video card to accelerate the recovery:

The recovery speed can be further increased by using two or more video cards (up to 8 units per PC in total).

You can decrypt the keychain using the recovered password with Elcomsoft Password Digger. The tool exports the full data set into an XML file or builds a filtered dictionary for using with password recovery tools.

Accelerated BitLocker Recovery

BitLocker encryption is quickly becoming standard on Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 tablets and laptops equipped with non-removable RAM and built-in TPM modules. Due to the strong protection used by Microsoft on BitLocker volumes, brute-forcing passwords is extremely slow to the point of becoming unfeasible for all but the simplest passwords. The new release triples the recovery speed when using compatible GPU acceleration units. While breaking BitLocker passwords remains slow, it becomes feasible if a good password dictionary is available.

• CPU Xeon E5-2603 (4 cores, 1.80GHz): 2 passwords per second (no change)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti: 150 passwords per second (from 60)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980: 490 passwords per second (from 160)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan: 195 passwords per second (from 95)

Enhanced Wi-Fi Password Recovery

In this release, we removed annoying technical limitations from the algorithm breaking WPA/WPA2 (-PSK) passwords. The new algorithm no longer matches the number of active CPU cores to the number of available GPU units. To give an example, let’s look at a typical system with a single 4-core CPU and 8 installed NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 cards.

The old version was only able to utilize up to 3 video cards (of the 8 installed), delivering the combined maximum recovery speed of approximately 480,000 passwords per second. That happened because in the previous version of EDPR each GPU unit required a dedicated CPU core. Out of the four available cores, the tool used three cores with one being reserved. The new release lifts this restriction and utilizes all 8 video cards, boosting the speed to 1,300,000 passwords per second.

In addition, if you’re using a CPU-only system to attack Wi-Fi passwords, we boosted the recovery speed some 80 per cent by adding support for Intel AVX2 instruction set (available on Intel Haswell, Broadwell, and Skylake CPU’s).

Here’s what the numbers look like. First, we built the ultimate password crunching computer with two Intel Xeon CPUs (Xeon E5-2603) and three NVIDIA video cards: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980, NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750Ti. The result is about 300,000 passwords per second.

Then we tried a different config using an Intel Pentium CPU (G2030) coupled to three AMD boards (Radeon HD 6970 and two AMD Radeon HD 5970 – oldies but goodies) and got 392,000 passwords per second. As you can see, the numbers are similar, delivering impressive performance.

What Else Is New

We added AMD acceleration support for recovering Internet Key Exchange (IKE) (previously NVIDIA only). Lots of small performance enhancements to other formats are included.

The latest release of Elcomsoft Distributed Recovery gets faster yet, accelerating recovery speeds for many supported formats and adding OS X keychain password recovery. Its GPU-assisted acceleration coupled with zero-overhead scalability deliver best in class performance and the fastest recovery rates on the market. Update your copy today if you ordered less than a year ago, or check update eligibility and cost by entering your product key at https://www.elcomsoft.com/key.html.