Using Amazon EC2 + Hashcat to crack Truecrypt passwords

Operating Systems & Open Source
1

I have some old backups in Truecrypt containers that I seem to have forgotten the password to. I tried running olHashcat for several hours on my Radeon 7970 with various dictionaries and permutations, but got nowhere... So I was thinking of using Amazon EC2.

Anyone tried it? They do a p2 K80 instance for $0.90/hour or a g2 instance with some kind of consumer grade (1536 CUDA cores) GPU for a mere $0.05/hour. The g2 type is close to the cost of the electricity to run my 7870 for an hour around here.

With spot pricing it can be even lower, with the p2 type going down to $0.09 at times.

Has anyone tried any of this?

2

I use GPU .large instances occasionally for ML work, I don't see why you couldn't do it with hashcat either.

I'd say go for it. Just read the EC2 doc before jumping in blind.

3

Actually I just noticed that Nvidia cards are total crap for Hashcat. The K80 is much slower than my 7970!

The only real advantage of using EC2 is not having to warm my house up in the summer, or accelerating by using multiple GPUs when they are cheap via spot pricing.

If I can get cheap spot pricing I might try it.