I’m stil comfortable that a decently thought-out AES/Serpent/Twofish cascade (with keyfiles) will be safe until roughly the heat-death of the universe, or the bankruptcy of whatever organisation is trying to brute-force it, whichever comes first.

von Neumann-Landauer limit FTW, in other words.

If this story tells us anything, it tells us that Microsoft’s security implementations are, like everything they produce, a half-assed second-rate compromise that still manages to require 5x the LoC of a decent alternative.

That’s sort of like saying that Dick Cheney is a bit of a dick. It’s not news.

Anyone with a significant budget, could assemble enough of these systems to begin to search for gaps in the armour of a target.

The goal is not to make information inaccessible. It’s to make it cost more to get access than the information is worth.

For personal banking details, you want it to be too expensive for the average criminal (or small criminal enterprise) to gain access, so blowfish with a short password is good enough.

If it’s human-rights/insurgency related in the Middle East and lives are at stake, you’ll want to use something much stronger.

I was actually paraphrasing some leading cryptologists, and former people from the NSA.  They had varioiusly been describing the advanced state of modern crypto-analysis based in supercomputing, as well as brute force password guessing as in the current article by Cory.

The bottom line is that anything can be cracked, and it is just a matter of time and money.  That is why Zimmerman called his PGP encryption software “Pretty Good Privacy” instead of “Complete Privacy”. 

People should consider encryption a good way to keep things private from those who are not looking,

http://superuser.com/questions/100866/the-difference-between-gpu-and-cpu#answers

The CPU is general-purpose. It handles all your general arithmetic and logic, and the instructions in memory and then executes them. And it handles your IO.

While the GPU is narrowly focused. The GPU is designed to handle the small parallel instruction sets useful for various parts of graphics processing, video decoding, etc…

A GPU is actually generally not more powerful than a CPU. If you gave a CPU and a GPU the same set of instructions to run though once on a single set of data. The CPU would likely beat the GPU, and in some cases it wouldn’t even be possible for the GPU to do what you ask.

The power of the GPU comes from it’s ability to take a single set of instructions, and run those same set of instructions on hundreds of pieces of data at the exact same time. While the CPU would have to run those instructions in a loop one after each other in sequence.

That’s why GPUs are more powerful than CPUs for tasks like graphics processing where you are applying the same instructions on large numbers of pixles, vertexies, etc… And in this case, password hashes. Because the GPU gets to solve hundreds of hash operations at the same time while the CPU gets to solve one.

I’m rather inclined to agree with the assessment of the value of passwords being fairly low these days. We’ve started using multiple rounds of SHA-512 where possible, which really slows down the hash throughput rate.

If we use 14 character passwords drawn evenly from the whole 94 character easy-to-type-on-a-standard-keyboard set, and then assume that they were hashed using NTLM (no upcasing and splitting and it’s the quickest password hash they tested against), it would take them 94^14/3.84e11 = 1.2e16 seconds.  There’s roughly 3e7 seconds per year, so about 4e8 years, which is to say 400 million years.  Even a 14 character password drawn from only lowercase letters would be 26^14/3.84e11 = 1.85e8 seconds = about 6 years.

So, realistically, long random passwords: still perfectly safe unless they do something really dumb in the hash which effectively reduces the length (as LM does).

The upshot of this story is that commercially-available, off-the-shelf, inexpensive hardware is available that will allow a moderately determined attacker to reverse-engineer your original password, from a stolen database of encrypted passwords (hashes), inside of minutes – meaning, if someone stole (let’s say) a 1000-person corporation’s NTLM hash database off a hard drive that was not properly wiped by a tech, they could have all their 14-character-length policy-enforced “strong”, random-noise-generated passwords inside 6 hours 4 days a significantly short amount of time.
Edit- they updated the article; the 6-minute figure is for LM hashes (as in, exhausting the entire hash keyspace), while an 8-character NTLM hash keyspacewould take 5.5 hours at most, for 100% of a 1000-password corporation’s hash database.