At the upcoming Black Hat DC event, we will demonstrate breaking encryption in the cloud using GPU-accelerated supercomputing. Our custom tool utilizes Amazon EC2 cluster GPU instances for distributed password cracking, achieving speeds of over 400,000 PMKs per second against WPA-PSK handshakes.
Addressing the Media Coverage
Because of the huge media coverage about my upcoming talk “Breaking encryption in the cloud: GPU accelerated supercomputing for everyone” at Black Hat DC I want to make sure that no one is getting a wrong impression on what I’m going to demonstrate:
Benchmarking GPU Instances on Amazon EC2
Back in November last year (happy new year by the way) I did a very simple benchmark using the CUDA Multiforcer to get a basic idea on how Amazons new ‘cluster GPU instances’ are performing when it comes to brute forcing passwords that are stored as SHA-1 hash. Because I was very interested in doing some work in this direction, I decided to start programming a tool that’s able to startup instances on the Amazon EC2 cloud and uses them to crack encryptions in a distributed way. The possibility of doing so is nothing new: Moxie Marlinspike, a security researcher, is running a service called WPACracker that can be used for cracking handshake captures of WPA-PSK using several, very large dictionaries on a 400 CPU cluster that runs on the Amazon cloud. Even though this process is pretty fast (around 20 minutes), I wanted to know how much speed at which cost factor we can get using the latest generation of cloud instances.
Expected Performance and Open Source Release
The results of my work and the tool that I developed to do this will be released as part of the talk, so that everyone will be able to start his own cluster in the cloud and get some impression on what can be done using the latest high performance computing possibilities. To give you an idea on what I mean with high performance: I’ll demonstrate how to break a WPA-PSK handshake at a speed of ~400.000 PMKs/s, maybe (if I get it finished till then) also at a speed of over 1.000.000 PMKs/s per second.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is GPU-accelerated password cracking?
GPU-accelerated password cracking involves utilizing the massive parallel processing power of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) rather than standard CPUs. This dramatically increases the speed of hashing calculations, making it much more efficient to execute brute-force and dictionary attacks on encrypted data.
How does the Amazon EC2 cloud facilitate distributed password cracking?
The Amazon EC2 cloud offers on-demand scalable computing resources, including highly potent cluster GPU instances. By deploying specialized software across these instances, security professionals can create a distributed computing environment that drastically reduces the time required to crack complex encryptions like WPA-PSK handshakes.
What speed improvements are seen with modern cloud GPU clusters?
Using the latest generation of cloud GPU clusters, benchmark tests indicate that one can evaluate approximately 400,000 Pairwise Master Keys per second (PMKs/s) against a WPA-PSK handshake. With further optimization, distributed networks may surpass one million PMKs/s, demonstrating unprecedented computational speed.