August 14, 2010 by Jack Fox
A new survey by technology researchers suggests that the popular practice of employing graphics cards as supercomputer surrogates is risking security and needs to be addressed. The researchers suggest that people who use short passwords could be at risk of people hacking them and gaining access to PCs.
According to the research undertaken by the Georgia Tech Research Institute, led by Richard Boyd, processors on graphics cards will render it very simple for malicious hackers to obtain security information. Passwords which are formed by seven or fewer characters will be easy to crack, as hackers become more sophisticated.
In order to ensure the security of passwords, users should start making them at least twelve characters long to safeguard against hackers.
Boyd and his team have been analysing the power of graphics cards when it comes to cracking passwords by number-crunching. Stream processors in each card mean that they are becoming popular among scientists using them to undertake mathematical problems.
Mr. Boyd commented: “The number crunching abilities of graphics cards are now comparable to the multi-million dollar supercomputers built about a decade ago. The parallel processing systems inside graphics cards are very good at carrying out so-called “brute force” attacks that effectively try every possible combination of letters and numbers until the right one is found. Longer passwords take longer to crack and offer better protection.”
“Right now we can confidently say that a seven-character password is hopelessly inadequate, and as GPU power continues to go up every year, the threat will increase. A better alternative would be a twelve character combination of upper and lower case letters, symbols and digits. Ultimately, users may be forced to rely on whole sentences that are a mix of different sorts of characters to ensure no-one else can guess their password and get at online services.”
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