GPU Accelerated Password Cracking in the Cloud: Speed and Cost-Effectiveness

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Sat, 05 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Note: Though this testing was done on Google Cloud and I work at Google, this work and blog post represent my personal work and do not represent the views of my employer.

As a red teamer and security researcher, I occasionally find the need to crack some hashed passwords. It used to be that John the Ripper was the go-to tool for the job. With the advent of GPGPU technologies like CUDA and OpenCL, hashcat quickly eclipsed John for pure speed. Unfortunately, graphics cards are a bit hard to come by in 2021. I decided to take a look at the options for running hashcat on Google Cloud.

Even With the Cloud, Client Security Still Matters

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Wed, 27 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

As usual, this post does not necessarily represent the views of my employer (past, present, or future).

It’s Friday afternoon and the marketing manager receives an email with the new printed material proofs for the trade show. Double clicking the PDF attachment, his PDF reader promptly crashes.

“Ugh, I’m gonna have to call IT again. I’ll do it Monday morning,” he thinks, and turns off his monitor before heading home for the weekend.

Cloud on System Overlord

GPU Accelerated Password Cracking in the Cloud: Speed and Cost-Effectiveness

Even With the Cloud, Client Security Still Matters