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An efficient heterogeneous parallel password recovery system on MT-3000

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Abstract

Password-based recovery is a widely used method for regaining access to applications or services when passwords are lost or forgotten. It is commonly used in electronic forensics by law enforcement agencies, information acquisition in the commercial sector, and data recovery for individuals. However, as encryption algorithms and complex passwords become more prevalent for security purposes, traditional CPU-based and GPU-based password recovery systems are struggling to meet the time-sensitive requirements for deciphering, and there is an urgent need for a more efficient password recovery system. Therefore, this paper presents an efficient heterogeneous parallel password recovery system based on the MT-3000 multi-zone processor. According to the architectural features of MT-3000, this system adopts a heterogeneous multi-level parallelism strategy, including inter-acceleration cluster data parallelism through MPI, intra-acceleration core data parallelism through the hthreads APIs, and instruction-level parallelism through a very long instruction word manner. Additionally, this system utilizes a unified task allocation mechanism that assigns the initialization and comparison verification tasks to the CPU side, while the accelerator side executes the hash iteration. This approach ensures that the system achieves optimal performance while maintaining its efficiency. The experimental analysis and results confirm that the proposed system significantly improves the recovery efficiency compared to traditional CPU-based and GPU-based systems, and also has an advantage in deciphering speed compared to the most popular hybrid CPU-FPGA-based system. Furthermore, it offers superior scalability, allowing for expansion to more compute nodes, making it a good solution for large-scale password recovery needs.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially supported by grants from the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021YFB0300101) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62032023, 42104078, 6190241). The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Funding

Funding for this study was received from the National Key Research and Development Program of China, 2021YFB0300101, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, 62032023, 42104078, 6190241.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Digitizing Software for Frontier Equipment, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Yongtao Luo & Jie Liu

  2. National Key Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Computing, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Yongtao Luo & Jie Liu

  3. Computer School, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Chunye Gong

  4. National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, Tianjin, 300457, China

    Chunye Gong & Tun Li

Authors
  1. Yongtao Luo
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  2. Jie Liu
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Contributions

L.Y.T was responsible for manuscript writing, experimental method design, research, and data analysis; L.J and G.C.Y were responsible for validation and verification, supervision, and guidance; and L.T was responsible for guidance and textual revisions. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Chunye Gong.

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Luo, Y., Liu, J., Gong, C. et al. An efficient heterogeneous parallel password recovery system on MT-3000. J Supercomput 81, 38 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-024-06532-9

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