Hyun Jun Kim, Si Woo Eum, Hwa Jeong Seo

KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 69-76, Feb. 2023
https://doi.org/10.3745/KTCCS.2023.12.2.69,   PDF Download:
Keywords: password cracking, CUDA, Optimization, PDF
Abstract

Hundreds of thousands of passwords are lost or forgotten every year, making the necessary information unavailable to legitimate owners or authorized law enforcement personnel. In order to recover such a password, a tool for password cracking is required. Using GPUs instead of CPUs for password cracking can quickly process the large amount of computation required during the recovery process. This paper optimizes on GPUs using CUDA, with a focus on decryption of the currently most popular PDF 1.4–1.6 version. Techniques such as eliminating unnecessary operations of the MD5 algorithm, implementing 32-bit word integration of the RC4 algorithm, and using shared memory were used. In addition, autotune techniques were used to search for the number of blocks and threads that affect performance improvement. As a result, we showed throughput of 31,460 kp/s (kilo passwords per second) and 66,351 kp/s at block size 65,536, thread size 96 in RTX 3060, RTX 3090 environments, and improved throughput by 22.5% and 15.2%, respectively, compared to the cracking tool hashcat that achieves the highest throughput.

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