Lots of people are raving about the MD5/GPU password hashing implementation at the moment; to me it’s old news (anyone remember attempts to run DES on the Amiga A500’s bit blitter?) but just for amusement’s sake I decided to see what Sun’s new Victoria Falls hardware could do in the password cracking space.

Cutting to the punchline: a 128-thread SPARC Enterprise T5240 Server using OpenSSL’s DES_crypt implementation[1] seems capable of approximately 45,100 crypts per second per thread.

Stated differently this box can make 5,772,800 password guesses per second.

Round it down to five million to allow for overhead.

That’s not too shabby, and I’ve not yet tried bumming the code for assembly, in-lining and cache strategies, etc; there are a few of those machines kicking around, and Crack can already network them. 🙂

But it would still be nice if someone who cared and understood GPUs tried implementing the Unix password hash algorithm. It’s about time it got killed…

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[1] T5240 with 128 threads at 1167MHz, ZFS, Solaris Nevada, Sun Studio 12 compilers in 64-bit mode, current OpenSSL with stock makefile config for SPARC/Solaris