Nvidia RTX 5090 Shatters Password Cracking Records, Highlighting Importance of Complex Passcodes

The Nvidia RTX 5090 has demonstrated exceptional performance beyond gaming and AI, excelling in the realm of password cracking as well. Hive Systems, a company known for its GPU benchmarking, recently updated its password cracking tests to include the RTX 5090, revealing the card's remarkable capabilities. In their latest benchmark, featuring a cluster of 12 RTX 5090 graphics cards, Hive Systems found that the cards could crack simple eight-character numerical passwords in just 15 minutes. This is a significant improvement over their previous results with the RTX 4090, which was last benchmarked in 2024. Hive Systems has been benchmarking password cracking times on GPUs for five years. Instead of cracking actual passwords, they crack password hashes—scrambled versions of passwords generated by software. Companies often store user passwords as hashes to secure them from potential theft. If a hacker gains access to a password database, they will only see these hashes, not the real passwords. The process of cracking password hashes involves generating all possible character combinations and matching them against the stolen hashes. Graphics cards, such as the RTX 5090, are excellent for this task due to their highly parallelized computing architecture. With a cluster of 12 RTX 5090s, Hive Systems discovered that these cards could crack the hash of an eight-character numerical password in just 15 minutes. For eight-character passwords consisting solely of lowercase letters, the same cluster required about three weeks. However, the time significantly increased with more complex passwords. Cracking an eight-character password that includes numbers, uppercase, and lowercase letters would take the cluster 62 years. Adding symbols to the mix extends the estimated time to 164 years. To put this into perspective, a single RTX 5090 can crack an eight-character numerical password hash in three hours. By comparison, the RTX 4090 takes four hours, indicating a 33% performance improvement. As password complexity increases, the RTX 5090's advantage over its predecessor becomes even more pronounced. For an eight-character password with numbers, uppercase, and lowercase letters plus symbols, the RTX 5090 is reportedly twice as fast as the RTX 4090, although such a complex password would still take about a thousand years to crack. These findings underscore the importance of password complexity in enhancing security. Even a modest increase in complexity, like adding symbols or capital letters, can exponentially increase the time needed to crack a password. The good news is that hackers require a stolen database of password hashes to perform these attacks. Without access to the database, brute-forcing password hashes is practically impossible. In summary, the Nvidia RTX 5090's password cracking benchmarks highlight the dangers of using simple passwords and the critical role that complexity plays in safeguarding user data. While the performance of the RTX 5090 is impressive, the takeaway for users is clear: choose strong, complex passwords to significantly reduce the risk of being hacked.