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.

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).

If you care about password cracking, hardware acceleration or Wi-Fi protection this interview with our friend Sethioz is certainly for you. Being currently a freelance security tester Sethioz kindly shared his experience in cracking passwords using video cards, which in its turn derived from his gaming interest in cards. His personal experience may be very helpful to those whose concern about password cracking is not trivial.

There had been a long standing competition between NVIDIA and ATI which has lasted for years now. And there is no winner so far — just like with Windows vs. Linux or PC vs. Mac debate there are ones who prefer the former and others who prefer the latter. Kind of «religious» issue.

Some time ago we wrote about the smallest password cracking device. Not suitable for you? No problem, here is another one: not as small, but definitely more powerfull: Audi. Yes, it's a car. No, we're not kidding. Just read NVIDIA and Audi Marry Silicon Valley Technology with German Engineering press release from NVIDIA. Or if you need more information, The New MMI Generation from Audi might be also helpful. In brief: Audi A8 luxury sedan is equipped with an entertainment system that uses two GPUs from NVIDIA. We have no idea what are these chips (may be Fermi?) and is it technically possible to load our own code to them, but still funny, isn't it? 🙂

Looking for new password cracking hardware (to take advantage of GPU acceleration)? Wait just a little bit more: new ATI and NVIDIA cards (with DirectX 11) will be available soon.