Will I obtain acceleration of password breaking on a CPU with AES-NI (AES hardware support)?
A user has asked : ¨I am now breaking passwords on a CPU without AES hardware support. If I replace it with a CPU with AES/AES-NI support, will breaking be accelerated? And will this acceleration be significant?¨
This is Passcovery's response:
Password breaking. When is a CPU with AES-NI necessary?
No, most likely you will not notice acceleration of password breaking from the presence of AES/AES-NI hardware support in the CPU. For password validation, encryption on the AES takes such an insignificant time that the difference between algorithmic execution at the software level or by the CPU's power is not noticeable.
An exception is the Adobe PDF/R6 format (these are Adobe Acrobat X-XI documents), which AccentPPR and Passcovery Suite support. Both of these programs successfully use hardware AES/AES-NI to accelerate password breaking for opening PDF documents:
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Accent PDF Password Recovery for removing passwords from Adobe PDF documents |
Download x86 (7136 Kb) |
Download x64 (8164 Kb) |
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Passcovery Suite for Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, ZIP, RAR, TrueCrypt, Apple iOS, BlackBerry OS, WPA |
Download x86 (15608 Kb) |
Download x64 (18132 Kb) |
For other formats with which our products work (even with those where there is no password recovery support on the GPU), execution using the AES-NI does not provide an increase in speed. To accelerate password breaking for files of such formats, we employ source code optimization based on SSE2/AVX/AVX2 instructions. The processing speed of the AES thus has a small influence.
It should be noted that if the format permits full-capability use of SSE2 instructions, it is possible to organize password breaking on AMD/NVIDIA video cards. And there are totally different speeds of password search.
About hardware support of AES/AES-NI
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a symmetric algorithm for block enciphering that is recognized as a standard. It was widely adopted and is used by many software producers for data security.
To accelerate enciphering, at some point support for the AES algorithm was introduced directly into Intel and AMD processors. This is also hardware support for AES. Intel calls this technology Intel AES-NI (New Instruction), although there are no differences in principle in implementing the algorithm, compared to AMD processors.