This article opens the series of publications aimed to help experts specify and build effective and power-efficient workstations for brute-forcing passwords. Power consumption and power efficiency are two crucial parameters that are often overlooked in favor of sheer speed. When building a workstation with 24×7 workload, absolute performance numbers become arguably less important compared to performance per watt. We measured the speed and power consumption of seven video cards ranging from the NVIDIA Quadro T600 to NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti and calculated their efficiency ratings.

Today’s data protection methods utilize many thousands (sometimes millions) hash iterations to strengthen password protection, slowing down the attacks to a crawl. Consumer-grade video cards are commonly used for GPU acceleration. How do these video cards compare, and what about the price-performance ratio? We tested five reasonably priced NVIDIA boards ranging from the lowly GTX 1650 to RTX 3060 Ti.

In Alder Lake, Intel introduced hybrid architecture. Large, hyperthreading-enabled Performance cores are complemented with smaller, single-thread Efficiency cores. The host OS is responsible for assigning threads to one core or another. We discovered that Windows 10 scheduler is not doing a perfect job when it comes to password recovery, which requires a careful approach to thread scheduling.

Encrypting a Windows system drive with BitLocker provides effective protection against unauthorized access, especially when paired with TPM. A hardware upgrade, firmware update or even a change in the computer’s UEFI BIOS may effectively lock you out, making your data inaccessible and the Windows system unbootable. How to prevent being locked out and how to restore access to the data if you are prompted to unlock the drive? Read along to find out.

Most password protection methods rely on multiple rounds of hash iterations to slow down brute-force attacks. Even the fastest processors choke when trying to break a reasonably strong password. Video cards can be used to speed up the recovery with GPU acceleration, yet the GPU market is currently overheated, and most high-end video cards are severely overpriced. Today, we’ll test a bunch of low-end video cards and compare their price/performance ratio.

Windows backups are rarely targeted during investigations, yet they can be the only available source of evidence if the suspect’s computer is locked and encrypted. There are multiple third-part backup tools for Windows, and most of them have password protection as an option. We are adding the ability to break password protection of popular backup tools: Acronis True Image, Macrium Reflect, and Veeam.

BestCrypt, developed by the Finnish company Jetico, is a cross-platform commercial disk encryption tool directly competing with BitLocker, FileVault 2 and VeraCrypt. Volume encryption is available for Windows and macOS. Learn how to break BestCrypt full-disk encryption by recovering the original password!

Backups are the primary way to preserve data. On smartphones, backups are handled automatically by the OS. Windows lacks a convincing backup app; numerous third-party tools are available, some of which feature strong encryption. Computer backups may contain valuable evidence that can be useful during an investigation – if you can do something about the password.

iMessage, Hangouts, Skype, Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp are familiar, while PalTalk, Pigin, Psi Jabber client, Gadu-Gadu, Gajim, Trillian, BigAnt or Brosix are relatively little known. The tools from the first group are not only more popular but infinitely more secure compared to the tools from the second group. In this publication we’ll review the authentication methods used by the various instant messengers, and attempt to extract a password to the user’s account.

Released back in 2013, VeraCrypt picks up where TrueCrypt left off. Supporting more encryption algorithms, more hash functions and a variable number of hash iterations, VeraCrypt is the default choice for the security conscious. VeraCrypt has no known weaknesses except one: once the encrypted disk is mounted, the symmetric, on-the-fly encryption key must be kept in the computer’s RAM in order to read and write encrypted data. A recent change in VeraCrypt made OTF key extraction harder, while the latest update to Elcomsoft Forensic Disk Decryptor attempts to counter the effect of the change. Who is going to win this round?