Photo by Amy Shamblen on Unsplash

Blowing Up A Balloon And Breaking Crypto Crackers

We have a problem with password hashing, in that crackers can now run at speeds of TeraHashes per second. That’s a thousand billion passwords that can be hashed every second. The reason we can achieve these rates is that we can run the cracker on GPUs which have thousands of processing elements. We thus just segment our passwords up, and then allocate them as threads to our processing elements. A GPU…