Jeremi Gosney
More info
- Founded
- Sagitta HPC, Terahash
- Known for
- The 25-GPU cluster (Passwords^12, 2012), hashcat
The password cracker who in 2012 strung together 25 graphics cards and put an end to the idea that eight-character Windows passwords were safe.
At Passwords^12 in Oslo in December 2012 Gosney showed a GPU cluster of 25 AMD Radeon cards spread across five servers, tied together with Virtual OpenCL so that hashcat saw them as one machine. Against NTLM hashes it managed around 350 billion guesses per second — enough to try every eight-character combination of keyboard characters in under six hours.
The point wasn't that NTLM was weak; everyone knew that. It was that fast, unsalted hashes had become pointless for passwords. Gosney was part of the hashcat team, sat on the panel of the Password Hashing Competition that picked Argon2 in 2015, and has run companies selling exactly this kind of rig — to people who need to know how bad things are.