The Swiss company “Objectif Sécurité” was already known for its Ophcrack software. Ophcrack is an open source software that cracks XP/Vista passwords. The originality is that Ophcrack uses rainbow tables. Rainbow tables are data structures, invented by Philippe Oechslin the founder of the company, that drastically accelerate the process of brute force exploration of passwords. Although Ophcrack is open source software, the rainbow tables are not. Objectif sécurité sells these tables.

Objectif Sécurité has designed a new version of rainbow tables optimized to use Solid State Disks (SSD). SSD are blitz fast hard drives using solid state memories rather than magnetic memories. They do not have mobile parts and thus have an extremely fast access. According to Objectif Sécurité, they can crack a 14 character XP password in less than 6 seconds with a rather conventional PC but with 80GB of tables in SSD.

I forgot. The initial requirement is that you have the XP/Vista hash of the user’s password. You can try on their site (don’t use YOUR password hash! :Happy:  ). They have a Web demonstration.