Cracking Passwords in the Cloud
Posted: Tue Nov 03, 2009 1:07 pm
I have to say, I thought about giving this a try at some point 
Article
Software
Article
Software
Unfortunately, on a fast dual core Windows7 box we were looking at something like 2100 days to brute force a reasonably long complex passphrase for these PGP ZIPs.
Down to ~122 days. Still unacceptable, but we're moving in the right direction. We kick off another 89 instances (to bring our total to 100, which is presently the upper limit of our Elcomsoft EDPR license), but run into a snag:
ec2-run-instances -n 89 -k ssh-keypair ami-54f3103d -g default -t c1.medium
Client.InstanceLimitExceeded: Your quota allows for 9 more instance(s). You requested at least 89
It appears that Amazon isn't keen to have folks DOS'ing EC2 by spawning arbitrarily large numbers of instances. A quick visit here and a reasonable justification should have us cracking away at top speed in short order.
Dear Sir,
Thank you for submitting your request to increase your Amazon EC2 limit. It is our intention to meet your needs. We will review your case and contact you within 3 - 5 business days.
From what we have seen to date, Elcomsoft EDPR appears to scale linearly as additional cracking agents are deployed. We are confident that as long as the EDPR manager system is properly equipped that you could easily deploy the maximum number of agents permitted by your EDPR license and cracking performance will scale linearly.