Originally Posted By: chaosmagnet
This article was written in August of 2007. Computers are dramatically faster than they used to be. Also, some bad guys are using botnets for password cracking. This means that some bad guys can apply several orders of magnitude more computing power to password cracking than they were able to when the article was written.
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In offline password cracking, the attacker is not subject to any of those limitations and password security needs to be significantly greater to prevent attacks from succeeding. Many authentication systems are subject to offline attacks.


The speed, processing power, of the computer used to crack a password doesn't make any difference. The process is not CPU dependent and is simply the input of a simple list of logical guesses. As mentioned in the article the main limitation is the speed with guesses can be made. The two main limitations are the speed of the connection and any limitation placed on how many attempts can be made in any set amount of time by the securing system. The basics are as relevant now as they were in 2007.