Curiously, I learnt about password cracking from playing golf. :)

As described in The golf course looks great, my swing feels good, I like my chances (Part III) (see "Eliminating Exponentiation" section and the C/assembler search program), searching for this golfic magic formula seems to be essentially equivalent to brute force password cracking. In this case, it took me six months to exhaustively md5 search a six character magic string (with 180 different characters in it). The most time-critical piece was the calculation of the md5 hash, and switching to an assembly language md5 routine made a huge difference to the speed of the brute force searcher. It would have been impossible for me to solve it in pure Perl.

In researching this problem, I stumbled upon some interesting links related to password cracking:

Though I haven't yet had a chance to play around with CUDA and OpenCL, these new technologies seem to have fundamentally changed the password cracking playing field. Nowadays, you see, a humble PC containing four or more high-end NVIDIA graphics cards, in harness with CUDA/OpenCL, is effectively a personal supercomputer. And since password cracking is highly parallelizable, a farm of these cheap super computers would make a formidable password cracking weapon.

In reply to Re: Improve password solver by eyepopslikeamosquito
in thread Improve password solver by sulfericacid

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