Question: how fast can you brute force a password

title: Brute-force attack
text: As commercial successors of governmental ASIC solutions have become available , also known as custom hardware attacks , two emerging technologies have proven their capability in the brute - force attack of certain ciphers . One is modern graphics processing unit ( GPU ) technology , the other is the field - programmable gate array ( FPGA ) technology . GPUs benefit from their wide availability and price - performance benefit , FPGAs from their energy efficiency per cryptographic operation . Both technologies try to transport the benefits of parallel processing to brute - force attacks . In case of GPUs some hundreds , in the case of FPGA some thousand processing units making them much better suited to cracking passwords than conventional processors . Various publications in the fields of cryptographic analysis have proved the energy efficiency of today 's FPGA technology , for example , the COPACOBANA FPGA Cluster computer consumes the same energy as a single PC ( 600 W ) , but performs like 2,500 PCs for certain algorithms . A number of firms provide hardware - based FPGA cryptographic analysis solutions from a single FPGA PCI Express card up to dedicated FPGA computers . WPA and WPA2 encryption have successfully been brute - force attacked by reducing the workload by a factor of 50 in comparison to conventional CPUs and some hundred in case of FPGAs . A