Oh go on – surely there must be some way to parallelise cracking operations?
Well, it depends on what I/you mean by “making it parallel”; if by that you mean “creating a password hashing algorithm that makes effective use of multiple CPUs to speed the essentially linear crypt() mechanism” – then no, I don’t believe it’d be viable (without specialist hardware) because the process of getting a password from an un-hashed state (say: Utah) to a hashed one (say: California) is most quickly achieved by dropping the data onto a single CPU (say: a Porsche 911) and driving non-stop. The only overhead here is (of course) in tuning your algorithm for your specific CPU architecture, to most closely resemble a Porsche 911. Nowadays, with locking overhead and synchronisation, using traditional multi-cpu parallelisation and threading would be more akin to hitch-hiking the length of the trip. That said: there exists a technique called “bitslicing” which alas is complicated to do unless you’re a crypto geek, but which basically involves packing as many people as feasible into y
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- Oh go on - surely there must be some way to parallelise cracking operations?
