![]() ![]() But as time goes by and the cost to crack a privacy-protecting password plummets, it's perhaps wise to keep up with the times and adapt our security measures adequately. Passwords are one of the necessary evils of a technological world, the one thing standing between a hacker and whatever piece of digital you standing on the other side of the input window. These encoded hashes (the garble that results from the encryption process) are the encrypted data which the GPU then has to reverse-engineer towards your actual password. But certain scenarios, such as data leaks, could see passwords exposed: either directly viewable, as plain text, or as an encoded hash. ![]() This kind of attack is mostly directed at offline password cracking, where certain scenarios allow for these millions of attempts to be even tried. It's important to mention that your online passwords, or passwords protected by two-factor authentication, aren't the ones being discussed here: Those usually have mechanisms that prevent brute force attacks from working. Of course, things could change with AMD's RDNA3-based cards ( we'll know more by November 3rd) but Nvidia does currently enjoy a sizeable lead here. The RTX 4090 may be almost twice as fast as the RTX 3090 across workloads, but it's three times faster than AMD's RX 6900 XT. Interestingly, Nvidia has been safely leading the Hashcat performance race. And the RTX 4090 halves that cost, despite its $1,599 MSRP. The lower the cost to hack is, the more attractive it becomes to hack a particular password. That person further has to manage electrical and workload time costs to crack that eight-character password (incidentally, the world's most common password length as of 2017 was exactly eight characters). Remember that the hacker, too, has to invest in graphics cards (which have only increased in pricing across generations). This cryptographic compute performance increase is what enables a reduction in how much money a hacker would have to spend in order to crack a password. Granted, the RTX 4090 tested was overclocked, but there's only so much extra performance that you can generate without compromising power efficiency. In the meantime, Hashcat performance of the RTX 4090 is 800% higher that of the GTX 1080. ![]() Performance Increase Among Top Tier Nvidia Graphics Cards Across Generations Row 0 - Cell 0 The cost isn't negligible, but then again, it's lower than we likely imagined it to be. Eight of the new cards can crack that 8-digit password in 48 minutes, after all. It's an unimaginably high number, coming in at a 16-digit figure. There are 96^8 possibilities for an 8-character password, and that's what the graphics card has to try to break. Of course, graphics cards are also capable of finding the correct password by trying every possible combination, what is known as a brute force attack. After all, this is where the GPU mining crisis that lasted most of the 30-series' life came from: explosive performance per watt improvements (with a boost from Ethereum's pricing). And because graphics cards are highly parallel engines, they're especially attuned for cryptographic duties, where performance is calculated at hashes per second. Hashcat is a specialized software used to test graphics cards' cryptographic performance - which can both mean encryption and decryption. ![]()
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