Farelf Posted June 7, 2011 Share Posted June 7, 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law When it comes to network/account/computer security the inescapable conclusion is that most of us are ultimately protected by nothing more than the "security of the herd" - there are just too many of us to be eaten by the predators in one sitting (and, hopefully, not before most of us can breed - I've done my bit ). Whatever other mainstream defences we might rely upon can be overtaken at any time by the evolving capabilities of the ungodly. Such musing comes about when reviewing the links offered up by member ChrisK in a post in newsgoup g.security at news.grc.com: http://mytechencounters.wordpress.com/2011...a-graphic-card/ http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/06/01/ho...under-a-second/ OK, not a DIRECT attack, simply a demonstration that a brute force approach to reveal a good Windows password given just its (unsecured) hash value (and, ideally for the hacker, knowing/guessing its length and character set - upper-lower alpha, numerals, special characters) can be achieved in less than the life of the universe using a cheap graphics card for the processing power these days. But, it's a very sound basis for actual bastadry. The same way as the demonstration of "collisions" in a hash generator (two different strings giving the same hash value) will reveal a "chink in the armour". A different kind of chink, to be sure (collision is a higher-level matter entirely), but any weakness is theoretically exploitable. And yes, of course, this kind of processing power can be used to probe for hash-generator collisions too. What, me worry? Noooo ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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