Password cracking is an activity that comes up from time to time in the course of various competitions. While it would be nice to have a dedicated password cracking rig, like anything from, it's just not practical for many people myself included. Having access to a GPU cracking machine would be nice from time to time however and the GPU systems that Amazon EC2 supports offers a decent compromise.

Doing research on how to setup a password cracking program such as oclHashcat on EC2 came up with results that gave all sorts of conflicting directions. These instructions seem way more straight forward then anything I've come across so hopefully this will be useful for you too. Click the Select button to choose this AMI. The next screen shows you the available types of EC2 instances that the AMI can run on. Since we're interested in an EC2 instance that supports the NVIDIA GRID GPU driver, the only ones that are available to us are the g2.2xlarge (which has 1 video card) and the g2.8xlarge (which has 4 video cards).

For now we will choose the the g2.2xlarge instance. All of the steps in this post work for the g2.8xlarge instance as well. The only difference being that you select g2.8xlarge at this step. Click the g2.2xlarge row and click on the 'Review and Launch ' button. You'll be asked if you want to use an SSD or magnetic as the boot volume. Akai S5000 Hard Drive Installation.

I think the SSD boot volume may incur additional costs so I opted to use the magnetic boot volume. You can click on the 'Next: Configure Instance Details' button if you need to configure additional options such as subnets or other specific behaviors.

Password cracking. Called the graphics processing unit or GPU. The graph above of relative WPA cracking speeds is for the Elcomsoft package using last year's. Wi-Fi Security: Cracking WPA With CPUs, GPUs. Nvidia In Brute-Force Attack Performance Nvidia's. Pyrit is not the best for cracking with gpu's. Cracking Hash- Cpu And Gpu Based. Then also it won’t match GPU’s performance. For SHA1 it will be even lesser and for WPA hash cracking it goes. WPA / WPA2 Hashcat benchmark collection. Speed is Hashcat version dependant. AMD Radeon RX series: Radeon RX 480: 184000: hash/s: Radeon RX 470: 155000: hash/s.

You can also adjust the amount of storage the AMI will have. The default is 8gb which won't hold most decent sized wordlists so you may want to bump that up if you'd like. This won't be necessary for this tutorial though. The next screen will allow you to review the details of the instance you are about to launch. Nothing special here and you can proceed to click the 'Launch' button. At this point you'll then be asked which key pair you want to use to connect to this instance.

Amazon will force you to use a private key file to authenticate to instances. If you already have a PEM key pair you can select that option. I'll assume you have never done this before so I'll go through creating a new key pair. Select 'Create a new key pair' from the top drop down box and enter a name for the new key pair you are about to create and click the 'Download Key Pair' button. I named mine nova-test-oclhashcat.