ATI Radeon HD 5970 is the king of iPhone, Wi-Fi password cracking

In the world of GPGPU i.e. GPU Computing, there aren’t many companies that really push the term of usability and efficiency. Luckily, Russian ElcomSoft is one of those companies. We already wrote about the company and their very interesting password-cracking products.

GPGPU Performance clearly shows who leads the security pack
Given the profile of ElcomSoft’s clients, which include security organizations such as the Interpol and three-letter agencies we usually see in movies, it isn’t all that unimaginable to see why ElcomSoft is pushing GPU Computing to the max. The company was one of first to support both ATI and nVidia GPUs and with every new generation of chips, ElcomSoft’s code goes to another level.

For instance, the company just announced GPU acceleration for their iPhone/iPod Backup and Wi-Fi Password Recovery if you’re using ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series. According to the company, ATI Radeon HD 5000 series offers up to 20x performance increase when compared to top of the line Core i7 CPUs and up to two times faster than enterprise-level, four GPU-based Tesla products.

Yes, you’ve read that correctly – using ElcomSoft’s Wireless Security Editor, the company claims ATI Radeon HD 5970, a dual-GPU consumer card broke 100,000 passwords per second. In comparison, Tesla S1070 with four Tesla C1070 boards achieves 52,400 passwords. For comparison Intel Core i7 920, a 2.66 GHz CPU with eight threads can calculate 4000 passwords per second, or 25 times slower than a dual-GPU beast from AMD. Intel’s sexa-core beast, Core i7 980X at 3.33 GHz cannot pass 6000 passwords per second – even with hard-encoded AES-NI encryption  instructions [AES-NI is a feature of 32nm Westmere architecture].

Thus, in this field, we would not be surprised to see GPU boards replacing expensive Xeon and Opteron systems in as soon as a single IT platform refresh cycle, a figure most Intel and AMD CPU sales teams fear the most. Memories of the speed how x86 CPU architecture leveled proprietary RISC to the ground in 1999-2001 [going from 20% to 85% share in 20 months] are fresh enough, and GPU Computing could as well do the same.

Wait… ElcomSoft runs CUDA and ATI is faster?
The very interesting bit and a bit of a slap for AMD’s public stance on how “CUDA is a closed standard” and developers that go developing with CUDA will suffer when they decide to switch to open standards… in reality, that is nothing else but hot air. ElcomSoft used CUDA to enable GPU acceleration in their software code and they’re proudly showing “Designed for CUDA” logo on their site. Yet, it is the simplicity of CUDA code that enabled AMD’s ATI STREAM version of the code to execute in “ass-whooping” way and passed the magical barrier of 100,000 broken Wireless passwords in a single second – a number security agencies will certainly appreciate. Thus, AMD Radeon HD 5970 has killing performance on an originally “Designed for CUDA” application. Interesting, right?

If you read ElcomSoft’s recent blog, you’ll see the way how ElcomSoft creates its software, and the way is quite similar to a lot of game developers: by putting an AMD Radeon and nVidia GeForce card in the same system, and switching from one to another when needed. Personally, I have the same setup, with Quadro DVP for video production and ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 Edition for gaming purposes, all on the ASUS P6T7 SuperComputer motherboard. It worked on Windows XP, it worked on Vista and yes, it works on Windows 7.

ElcomSoft did mention that the company didn’t had opportunity to test nVidia’s long delayed GPU based on the Fermi architecture, but the company believes that GPU could seriously outperform the current playing field. Here at BSN*, we have extensively tested ElcomSoft’s password breaking software and will include it as a part of our standard test suite.

Original Author: Theo Valich

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