ANOTHER SLIGHTLY GREY area of computing takes to GPUs to get its performance fix today. Elcomsoft, the Russian insecurity company, has doped up its Distributed Password Recovery suite to crack Wi-Fi WPA and WPA2 security with the aid of GPUs.

Yes, the ElcomSoft Distributed Password Recovery (EDPR) suite can network up to 10,000 CPUs and GPUs doing the Lord's good work (if you can't find a good reason... invoke divine right to do something).

This particular crackware is targeted at, and we quote, “forensic and government agencies" and in no way is intended to illegally crack you or your company's Wi-Fi network. It's just one of those apps that belong in Homeland Security-land, that would be a fine complement to stuff like Carnivore.

The EDPR suite will make use of your Nvidia GPU to brute-force attack a password encryption. The GPUs in question, as you might've guessed, are the CUDA-enabled ones from the 8600GT all the way up to the GTX family, although Elcomsoft considers it wise to put GPUs of the same family in the pot. Passwords include Windows logins, MD5 hashes and with this latest update, WPA- and WPA2-encrypted Wi-Fi networks. Woohooo.

According to the company's benchmarketing, an 8800GTX is up to 56x faster than an unnamed Core 2 Duo, in Windows Login passwords and MD5 hashes, and almost 16x faster in Office app cracking. No numbers given for Wi-Fi cracking, but that depends on a whole bunch of factors that don't depend on the cracking software. So if you're a legit business person who needs to crack passwords with your Nvidia GPU, you're set. ATI owners needn't feel left out, ElcomSoft expects to ship ATI-enhanced cracking by 2009.

ElcomSoft didn't specify whether they're using CUDA or not. It looks like it, considering they're part of the CUDA Developer Relations Program and the type of GPUs supported.

WPA2 was, until now, considered by many the "safest" (if there is such a thing) of the consumer Wi-Fi security encryptions, now it's a blink away from bursting open and sending forth its bits o'data. In the end this also means that Wi-Fi cracking, which was mostly done on Linux-based systems - you know real geeks who own real computers - is now ajar to the world of Windoze.

This is all particularly funny if you consider ElcomSoft's software is on the hot list of "To Crack" apps cracked by... uhm... crackers.

Crackers! µ