Publication Details
Distributed Password Cracking in a Hybrid Environment
Zobal Lukáš, Ing.
Večeřa Vojtěch, Ing.
Matoušek Petr, doc. Ing., Ph.D., M.A. (DIFS)
distributed computing, digital forensics, cryptography, password cracking, GPGPU,
BOINC
For forensic experts, encrypted data nowadays represent one of the biggest
challenges. With criminal suspects unwilling to surrender their passwords, the
only way to obtain the encryption key is by password disclosure or password
cracking. Modern cryptographic techniques are being enhanced to provide the
maximum level of security making it impossible for a single man with a computer
to crack the password within a meaningful time. General-purpose computing on
graphics processing units (GPUs) often accelerates the entire process.
Nevertheless, a single-machine GPU cracking has still its limits. Thus, the only
way of achieving the desired amount of computational power is distributed
cracking.
Not in every case the forensic investigators possess a dedicated computer
cluster powerful enough to serve their needs. Complex problems may require
merging multiple clusters together as well as the use of general-purpose hardware
to get as much computational power as possible. The computers may be even located
in geographically separated areas, e.g. multiple corporation branches, requiring
a solution for secure and reliable interconnection and control of the machines.
Using Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) framework
together with our specialized modules, we designed a solution for distributed
password recovery in a hybrid environment including, but not limited to,
individual general-purpose CPU nodes, GPU nodes, and specialized CPU/GPU
clusters. The solution is feasible for a variable number of nodes in an untrusted
and unstable environment, by offering proper adaptivity and robustness.
In the paper, we provide the experimental results of distributed cracking in
a hybrid CPU/GPU environment. The experiments include both exhaustive search and
dictionary attack. We analyze the results of different approaches using several
types of hardware. Our goal is to provide a survey comparing possible attack
techniques and connecting them with the most-fitting cases. The results may help
forensic investigators to choose a proper method for each case.
@inproceedings{BUT144413,
author="Radek {Hranický} and Lukáš {Zobal} and Vojtěch {Večeřa} and Petr {Matoušek}",
title="Distributed Password Cracking in a Hybrid Environment",
booktitle="Proceedings of SPI 2017",
year="2017",
pages="75--90",
publisher="University of Defence in Brno",
address="Brno",
isbn="978-80-7231-414-0",
url="https://www.fit.vut.cz/research/publication/11358/"
}