high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

In the practical usage of cryptography, if one wish to decrypt some data without knowing the secret key that has been used for the encryption, one usually does not try to break the underlaying cryptographic construction, nor does one try all possible keys. What is mostly done is to try to find the password that has been used to derivate the key used in the encryption. In this paper we try to speed up an exhaustive password based key derivation search using the parallelism offered by the GPU. We do this by implementing a specific, yet common, algorithm for password based key derivation in CUDA. The specific system we implement is PBKDF2 using HMAC-SHA1.