Intel has unveiled its latest lineup of dedicated graphics cards, driven by the powerful Intel Xe architecture. The Intel Arc series showcases impressive performance, rivaling mid-range offerings from competing brands, while maintaining an exceptional price-performance ratio that outperforms NVIDIA’s counterparts. In this article, we explore the potential of Intel Arc GPUs for forensic password recovery and delve into their performance capabilities, comparing them with both Intel’s built-in graphics and mid-range NVIDIA RTX boards.

Introduction

Password recovery is a critical process in the field of digital forensics. The process of password recovery involves attempting to gain access to password-protected data such as encrypted disks, files, or systems, by trying different password combinations until the correct one is found. Due to the constantly increased encryption and security measures leading to the increase in the complexity and length of passwords, traditional CPU-based methods for password recovery become inefficient and unfeasible due to unrealistic time constraints. To address this challenge, we at ElcomSoft developed GPU acceleration techniques to significantly speed up the password recovery process.

What is GPU acceleration?

GPU acceleration is a technique for accelerating complex calculations by utilizing the large number of graphics processing units (GPUs) found in today’s common graphics cards. Traditionally, computationally intensive tasks have been carried on computer’s central processors (CPUs). However, GPUs, which were designed for rendering and processing graphical data in the context of 3D gaming, are equipped with a large number of cores capable of performing certain kinds of calculations in multiple parallel threads.

GPU acceleration involves offloading certain calculations from the CPU to the GPU, taking advantage of the GPU’s massive capabilities in parallel processing. This parallelization enables the GPU to perform multiple (in the order of hundreds and thousands) tasks concurrently, significantly accelerating the process. GPU acceleration is particularly effective for tasks that involve calculating hash values, which are used by data encryption tools in their respective password-based key derivation functions for turning text-based passwords into binary encryption keys.

Intel Xe architecture

Intel’s foray into dedicated graphics cards began with the development of the Intel Xe architecture. The new architecture had the first limited release in the company’s OEM-only DG1 boards that did not get much traction and were criticized for their limited compatibility and extremely poor drivers. The Xe architecture was publicly released as the Intel Arc series of graphics cards. Featuring contemporary technologies such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing and AI enhancements, Intel Arc graphics cards sought to deliver higher performance, power efficiency, and affordability compared to established GPU manufacturers.

The initial release of the first generation of Xe boards received a varied response from the community. While Intel made efforts to address the discovered issues through driver updates, one prominent challenge remained unresolved: the high idle power consumption of their cards. This issue is primarily considered a hardware-related issue and is expected to be rectified in the next generation of Intel’s graphics cards. It’s worth noting, however, that this particular concern is largely irrelevant in the context of computationally intensive password recovery tasks, where the focus is on maximizing performance rather than idle power consumption.

Intel Arc performance benchmarks

Conclusion

GPU acceleration, particularly with Intel Arc graphics cards, offers a game-changing approach to password recovery, enabling faster and more efficient attacks. By utilizing the massively parallel processing power of GPUs, experts can significantly reduce the time required to recover passwords, while IT security specialists can audit and strengthen the security of their wireless networks by eliminating weak passwords that can be recovered quickly by an attacker. Intel’s new discrete GPUs offer unbeatable performance for the price, delivering higher password recovery rates per dollar spent on GPU acceleration hardware. After testing an Intel Arc A380 board, we’ve been impressed by the performance it delivers, which must be viewed in the context of the card’s rock bottom price compared to competition.