Workload Optimization Techniques for Password Guessing Algorithms on Distributed Computing Platforms

The following thesis covers several ways to optimize distributed computing platforms for cryptanalytic purposes. After an introduction on password storage, password guessing attacks and distributed computing in general, a set of inital benchmark results for a variety of different devices will be analyzed. The shown results are mainly based on utilization of the open source password recovery tool Hashcat. The second part of this work shows an algorithmic implementation for information retrieval and workload generation. This thesis can be used for the conception of a distributed computing system, inventory analysis of available hardware devices, runtime and cost estimations for specific jobs and finally strategic workload distribution