Certified Ethical Hacker CEH · Free Practice Question Medium

Question 21

A penetration tester wants to build a workstation that will be used to brute force hash digests. Which of the following is the BEST option to ensure sufficient power and speed to crack them?
  • A Multi-core CPU
  • B Dedicated GPU
  • C 7200-RPM HDD
  • D Integrated GPU
Reveal correct answer

Correct answer: B

Explanation

OBJ-9.1: Dedicated GPUs are designed to conduct complex mathematical functions extremely quickly. If you want to build a system to perform cracking of a password, hash, or encryption algorithm, it is important to have a high-speed, dedicated GPU. The reason to use a GPU instead of a CPU for password cracking is that it is much faster for this mathematically intensive type of work. Cracking passwords, hashes, and encryption is a lot like mining cryptocurrency in that using dedicated GPUs will give you the best performance.

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