Using nVidia Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA)

In this recipe, we will use the nVidia Compute Unified Device Architecure (CUDA) to crack password hashes. CUDA is a parallel computing platform that increases computing performance by harnessing the power of the GPU. As time has passed, GPU processing power has increased dramatically which allows us the ability to use it for our computational purposes. For demonstration purposes, we will use OclHashcat-lite to crack the passwords.

Getting ready

An nVidia CUDA supported graphics card is required to complete this recipe.

How to do it...

1. Open a terminal window and change to the directory that contains OclHashcat:

   cd /usr/share/oclhashcat-plus
   

   

2. Execute the following command to launch the cudaHashcat-lite help file:

   ./cudaHashcat-plus.bin –help
   

3. The syntax for running OclHashcat is in the form of cudaHashcat-plus64.bin [options] hash [mask].

   Note

   One of the important aspects of using OclHashcat is to understand its character-set structure.

4. Before...