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Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2018 16:01:15 +0200
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: john-users@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: questions regarding hardware acceleration which could be used for password recovery

On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 12:33:20PM +0200, JohnyKrekan wrote:
> Hello, I would like to ask what is your opinion which type of devices you would choose as accelerator:
> Passware company offer support for Tableau Tacc accelerator for password rate acceleration, Elcomsoft offer support for Pico computing FPGA.
> In my previous experiences I have used only GPUS. one NVidia geforce (while cracking WPA PSK it helped me to speed up the password recovery by 15x in comparison to  intel corei7 2.8ghz processor, and before that I have tested on my old PC the old ati radeon HD6850 against intel QX9550 where the GPU provided 20x times better performance than CPU).
> So final question: which technology would you prefer? GPU or FPGA Pico or Tableau TACC?

I think those FPGA-based accelerators as supported by Passware and
ElcomSoft products are for use by government agencies who somehow want
to cram the maximum performance (as of a few years ago) at specific few
things into 4U of rack space for $100k or so.  And these are now several
years out of date.  Pico Computing, now part of Micron, does have newer
products for a wide variety of uses, but I doubt they're readily
supported by any password cracking tools.

So unless you're a government agency with $100k to burn for little
reason, those products should be out of consideration for you.

This leaves you with GPUs (currently NVIDIA 10xx series) or ZTEX 1.15y
FPGA boards (which are now also out of date, but can be purchased for a
fraction of their original price if you're lucky to find them for sale).
We have some support for those ZTEX boards in jumbo, but currently only
for descrypt and bcrypt.

Alexander

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