How secure do you think YOUR wireless network is? That's a question that many people might want to revisit later on thanks to GPU-powered general-purpose computing (GPGPU).

Elcomsoft, a privately-owned company based out of Moscow, Russia specializes in Windows Productivity software and utility applications for business and end users. Recently the company released its Wireless Security Auditor suite, capable of cracking WPA/WPA2-PSK passwords in record breaking time by making use of your graphics card processor.

The said software suite makes use of a new technique called General Purpose GPU Computing(GPGPU). GPGPU is a method whereby applications make use of the processor on a high-end graphics adapter to complete standard and complex calculations. Since today’s high-end graphics boards from AMD/ATI and Nvidia are natively capable of processing large amounts of data / calculations per second, they make for prime candidates in mathematical processing outside of the gaming realm – hence the coming of age, GPGPU.

GPGPU - when used for the purpose of cracking WPA/WPA2 wifi passwords - decreases the time it takes to effectively decode the password by hundreds of times. See the chart below for a quick example, provided by Elcomsoft.

Wireless Security Auditor performs advanced dictionary search attacks with mutation to expose weak passwords consisting of words and phrases in spoken languages. The software also allows highly customized mutations of ordinary words to perform hundreds of mutations on each word in order to ensure the most attack coverage possible. Standard alpha-numeric incremental attacks are also supported, but naturally take a long time, even for supercomputers.

As of this writing, it is unknown if users of Multi-GPU systems would gain more performance over those utilizing single GPU solutions. If the use of Nvidia SLI or Triple-SLI could be used, you could drastically decrease the time even more.

Elcomsoft’s Wireless Security Auditor is listed at US$1199.00, but can be obtained for US$599.00 until the end of April of this year.

Source : Tom's Guide US