On October 25, 2007, Elcomsoft Co Ltd. in Moscow, Russia filed for a US patent on a reportedly new password recovery method that makes use of a video card's graphics processing unit (GPU). Elcomsoft credits the February 2007 release of the NVIDIA CUDA C-Compiler and developer's kit for providing the necessary low-level GPU access they needed to make this cryptographic advancement. The newest NVIDIA GPUs act as multiprocessors that utilize shared memory, cache, and multiple registers. The newest graphics cards utilize fixed point calculations, relatively massive amounts of memory, and multiple processing units. They differ significantly from a computer's central processing unit (CPU) in terms of their cryptanalytic processing capabilities and Elcomsoft claims to have leveraged newer GPU architectures to improve brute force password cracking by a factor of 25.
Statistics from Elcomsoft state that the new method can be used to exhaustively crack an eight...
