Password cracking using TeraFLOP and PetaByte Resources

Now here is an interesting paper on Teracrack. Basically they have examined the use of applying High-Performance Computing (HPC) resources such as parallel supercomputers to pre-compute and store crypt() based passwords that would be found using bruteforce cracking tools.

I love some of the findings:

Using the Blue Horizon supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, we found that pre-computing the 207 Billion hashes for over 50 million passwords can be done in about 80 minutes. Further, this result shows that for about $10K anyone should be able to do the same in a few months time, using one uni-processor machine.

Now for all you beowulf cluster fans... here is another project for ya. :)