Resource Management in Distributed Password Attacks

In the latest update, Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery introduced a new feature that allows managing the available computational resources. The new resource management capability allows administrators to manage and distribute the available computational resources across multiple jobs. The feature enables users to tap into a pool of available resources by requesting a certain number of recovery agents. The reserved recovery agents will be allocated, allowing multiple jobs to run separately at the same time.

In essence, the new resource management capability simplifies the process of managing and utilizing the available computational resources by several jobs, ultimately leading to improved efficiency and scalability.

In large organizations, there are often cases where various tasks need to be solved concurrently, and password recovery is no exception. At certain times, there may be multiple tasks with equal priority.

Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery in its classic shape has queues that are engineered to solve password recovery jobs consecutively and not in parallel, regardless of how much or how little computational resources are available. The tool includes numerous “agents,” which are powerful workstations with the EDPR agent apps installed on them, and a single server that controls and coordinates password recovery jobs by allocating all available computational resources to a single job on the top of the queue. The server in turn is managed through a GUI (we call it “console”), which is the user interface to interact with.

Users can run the console app on more than one computer, but a single EDPR license limits each console to a single server. If more than one license is available (thus several servers are available on the network), then each console can switch between those servers. Each server maintains its own job queue, and connects to its own, dedicated pool of agents, while each agent can only connect to a certain server (and cannot talk to other servers on the same network).

Several EDPR servers and thus several EDPR licenses are required to enable multiple password recovery jobs to work concurrently. As a result, each operator had their own server and a certain number of agents within their license framework. The sets of agents for different servers (and thus different users) did not intersect; each specific agent could only talk to its own server. If only one user was working, they only had access to the number of agents included in their license. This configuration led to resource idle time if no tasks were being run by a given user (or, rather, by a given server). In such cases, its agents – and consequently, the computers on which they were installed – remained idle.

To address this situation, we have added a new feature that allows for more efficient distribution of computational resources. The new administrative server enables splitting the available computational resources into any number of clusters, each of which can contain the maximum number of agents within the license of a particular workplace. Each computational cluster is connected to a separate server and can work on its own password recovery job.

Users can request the necessary computational resources from the administrator, who will allocate them through the new administrative server. The process can be best understood from the following diagram:

For inquiries regarding the licensing of Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery with resource management support, please contact our sales team at sales@elcomsoft.com

 By Oleg Afonin at 2024-02-20 11:59:32 Source ElcomSoft blog: