Password Recovery Can be Practical

Guidance Software’s Tableau Unit recently released Tableau™ Password Recovery, a hardware + software solution to accelerate password attacks on protected files, disks, and other containers.

It’s always fun to play with new toys, and when the new hotness is a purpose-built, linearly scalable, password-cracking behemoth, how can one not share? I did a bit of digging while running a two-server Tableau Password Recovery setup through its paces in our labs here in Pasadena, California, and while I found many good tools and tutorials for password cracking, I found it difficult to differentiate the theoretically possible from the actually practical. Here are some thoughts from that process.