Password Recovery for RAR Files Using CUDA

Driven by the insatiable demand of real-time graphics, especially from the market of computer games, graphics processing unit (GPU) is becoming a major computing horsepower during recent years since the performance of GPU is surpassing that of the contemporary CPU. This paper presents our study on how to efficiently recover the passwords for encrypted RAR files. Our research focus is on the AES key generation processing, which is the most time consuming stage in the whole RAR encryption/decryption process. The design and implementation of the password recovery are based on NVIDIA´s CUDA (computer unified device architecture). A CPU-based version is also implemented as a reference and the performance comparison with that of the GPU-based version. In addition, a modified model is proposed to estimate the performance by static analysis of code for and then further assist program optimization.