In the realm of password recovery, benchmarking the speed of attacks holds significant importance. It is a customary practice to gauge the speed of attacks on various data formats using diverse hardware configurations. These tests yield results that are visually represented through graphs clearly demonstrating the performance of our products. However, these graphical representations merely scratch the surface of a much broader scope. Today, we delve deeper into the objectives and methodologies behind our password cracking speed tests.

Intel has unveiled its latest lineup of dedicated graphics cards, driven by the powerful Intel Xe architecture. The Intel Arc series showcases impressive performance, rivaling mid-range offerings from competing brands, while maintaining an exceptional price-performance ratio that outperforms NVIDIA’s counterparts. In this article, we explore the potential of Intel Arc GPUs for forensic password recovery and delve into their performance capabilities, comparing them with both Intel’s built-in graphics and mid-range NVIDIA RTX boards.

Every three years, NVIDIA releases a new architecture used in their GeForce series graphics cards. Powered by Ada Lovelace, the new generation of GPUs delivers 80% better performance in password recovery compared to Ampere. While the new generation of NVIDIA graphics is faster and more efficient than Ampere, it also received a price hike. Is the update worth it for the forensic experts? Let’s try to find out.

This article continues the series of publications aimed to help experts specify and build economical and power-efficient workstations for password recovery workloads. Electricity costs, long-term reliability and warranty coverage must be considered when building a password recovery workstation. In this article we will review the most common cooling solutions found in today’s GPUs, and compare consumer-grade video cards with their much lesser known professional counterparts.

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.

Remember the good old times when there was a lot of applications with “snake oil” encryption? You know, the kind of “peace of mind” protection that allowed recovering or removing the original plaintext password instantly? It is still the case for a few “we-don’t-care” apps such as QuickBooks 2021, but all of the better tools can no longer be cracked that easily. Let’s review some password recovery strategies used in our software today.

GPU acceleration is the thing when you need to break a password. Whether you use brute force, a dictionary of common words or a highly customized dictionary comprised of the user’s existed passwords pulled from their Web browser, extracted from their smartphone or downloaded from the cloud, sheer performance is what you need to make the job done in reasonable time.

During the last several years, progress on the CPU performance front has seemingly stopped. Granted, last-generation CPUs are cool, silent and power-efficient. Anecdotal evidence: my new laptop (a brand new Macbook) is about as fast as the Dell ultrabook it replaced. The problem? I bought the Dell laptop some five years ago. Granted, the Dell was thicker and noisier. It’s battery never lasted longer than a few hours. But it was about as fast as the new Macbook.