Distributed MD4 Password Hashing with Grid Computing Package BOINC

Abstract

Distributed computing on heterogeneous nodes, or grid computing, provides a substantial increase in computational power available for many applications. This paper reports our experience of calculating cryptographic hashes on a small grid test bed using a software package called BOINC. The computation power on the grid allows for searching the input space of a cryptographic hash to find a matching hash value. In particular, we show an implementation of searching possible 5 character passwords hashed with the MD4 algorithm on the grid. The resulting performance shows individual searches of sections of the password space returning a near linear decrease in calculation time based on individual participant node performance. Due to the overhead involved of scheduling these sections of the password space and processing of the results, the overall performance gain is slightly less than linear, but still reasonably good. We plan to design new scheduling algorithms and perform more testing to enhance BOINC’s capability in our future research.