PROCESSOR TYPE AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO PERFORMANCE IN THE APPLICATION OF DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING TO DETERMINE VULNERABILITES IN PASSWORD FILES

Abstract

The recent explosion in hacking has necessitated that security managers understand how hackers are able to break passwords and operationally have superior versions of the tools used by hackers so that they can run proactive tests on the vulnerability of their resources. A resource that is especially vulnerable is the password file even though it is encrypted. This paper builds on a modular approach to offer improvements to a commonly used password attack tool called “John the Ripper” [7] (hereinafter called “John”) and evaluates its performance on three different types of processors: Sparc II, Intel and Sparc III. The results revealed that the Sparc III offers 3 to 4 times the performance of a Sparc II and that an Intel processor with a similar clock speed running assembler was close in performance to a Sparc III. Through distributed processing and improved software logic, we were able to reduce time to solve and increase number of passwords guessed over the “John” program running on a single machine. These results, if implemented properly, could offer security managers a competitive advantage over hackers in identifying vulnerable passwords quicker than the hackers can exploit them.