Recovering MD5-hashed passwords can be a computationally expensive task. This project aimed to investigate the possible speed-up achieved by using a digitally accelerated external hardware device to recover hashed passwords when compared to a golden measure executed on a computer when using a brute-force algorithm hash and test string combinations.
The VADER system will use a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) simulation to achieve speedup when recovering such passwords. The VADER system, with 1 408 900.11 hashes per second, was found to achieve an average speedup of 2.86× over the golden measure which operated at 492 812.89 hashes per second.
