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                           We could have done that

Via YARGB (Yet Another Really Great Blog) [1] are some interesting password
recovery times [2] based upon password content, length and type of computing
resources one has.

I remember back in college (Computer Science Department at Florida Atlantic
University) [3] (in the early 90s) we had access to a MasPar [4] with, I
think, 4,096 processing nodes. There was talk of writing a password cracking
program for the machine, which was a perfect use for the machine, being a
SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) architecture (same program on each
processing node, but different data). The default Unix password scheme (at
the time) used a 12 bit number to “randomize” the password, so there could be
4,096 different encryption results for any given password. A perfect fit for
the MasPar—instead of having to do 4,096 serial encryptions of a guess, all
4,096 possible values could be tested at once. An incredible increase in
speed (it could do in an hour what it would take a conventional computer
about 24 days to do).

But alas, we never got around to it; I'm suspect it was because no one really
wanted to program in FORTRAN (Formula Translation).

[1] http://yargb.blogspot.com/2006/04/tuesday-tech-digest_114472457798478649.html
[2] http://www.thecrypt.co.uk/lockdown/recovery_speeds.html
[3] http://www.cse.fau.edu/
[4] http://www.top500.org/orsc/1996/node15.html

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