If anyone has heard of Ippsec and watched his videos, you'll see that when he extracts a password hash from a machine, he doesn't crack it in his own computer, rather, he uses SSH to connect to his other machine called Kracken, and then cracks the password with hashcat or john. Are there any benefits to this? Why would he crack it there instead of using his own machine?
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Just conjecture, but maybe the remote machine is equipped with more resources (e.g. GPU's and the like) for higher-speed hashing.– mti2935Jul 16, 2021 at 23:17
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1It's probably a dedicated password cracking rig that he uses. Password cracking often requires a lot of computing power, usually in the form of GPUs. Unless you're a gamer, having lots of GPUs on your main computer isn't going to be useful (or if your main machine is a laptop, it won't even be possible), so having a separate cracking rig makes sense.– nobodyJul 16, 2021 at 23:18
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@nobody Almost no games even support multi-GPU anymore, actually! Plus a gaming PC will have a power-hungry and heat-generating high-end CPU, which is wasted on a hashing box.– CBHackingJul 18, 2021 at 4:09
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1 Answer
Given the name of the computer (it sounds like "cracking", and also is the name of a mighty beast), and the purpose to which it was put, it's almost certainly a dedicated rig for operations that require tons of parallel computation power of the sort provided by graphics processing units (GPUs). Modern GPUs are insanely fast at hash algorithms (some exceed 10 billion hashes per second), whereas even the best CPUs can only manage a tiny fraction of that. Additionally, it's relatively easy to install multiple powerful GPUs in a computer - just need a lot of PCIe slots and a very capable power supply - whereas scaling up CPU count requires more exotic hardware.
If somebody is working from a laptop, they would definitely want to use a remote desktop/server for this; even when laptops have a dedicated GPU, it's far less powerful than even a single high-end desktop GPU. High-end GPUs, being very power-hungry (the one in my desktop will use over 300W at full throttle, and there exist hungrier still), both require more electricity and more heat dissipation than a laptop can supply. Even if working from a desktop, most things don't need tons of GPU power, so it's reasonable to have one very powerful machine that spends its time doing things like cracking hashes (or mining Ethereum, or being turned off) that has multiple GPUs but minimal other components, while your main machine is optimized more around everyday tasks like web browsing, writing code, and so on; it'll have relatively fast CPU and large amounts of system RAM and SSD but at most one GPU. Even gaming rigs - with their fast CPU and fast RAM and high-end GPU - aren't nearly as good at hash cracking as an otherwise low-end machine with four or so good GPUs (and there's no point to putting multiple dedicated GPUs in a gaming PC; very few games can make any use of more than one at a time).
answered Jul 17, 2021 at 4:09
