The recovery of WPA and WPA2 encryption used in the Wi-Fi protocol has been accelerated by ElcomSoft Co. Ltd. by employing the new-generation NVIDIA video cards. ElcomSoft patent-pending GPU acceleration technology implemented in Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery allows using laptop, desktop or server computers equipped with supported NVIDIA video cards to break Wi-Fi encryption up to 100 times faster than by using CPU only.

Allowing breaking Wi-Fi protection quickly and efficiently with most laptop and desktop computers, Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery supports both WPA and the newer WPA2 encryption used in the majority of Wi-Fi networks. The recovery speed is increased with the support of NVIDIA graphic accelerators by an average of 10 to 15 times when Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery is used on a moderate laptop with NVIDIA GeForce 8800M or 9800M series GPU, or up to 100 times when running on a desktop with two or more NVIDIA GTX 280 boards installed. Governments, forensic and corporate users will benefit from vastly increased speed of breaking Wi-Fi protection provided by Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery.
   
Security becomes utterly important with growing numbers of Wi-Fi networks used by businesses and individuals all over the world. There are currently two methods of protecting Wi-Fi networks, WEP and WPA/WPA2. Unlike enterprise, RADIUS protected networks, consumer-grade WPA and WPA2 protection methods rely on passwords and encryption to protect traffic transferred between users and network access points. As sometimes it can be broken in less than two minutes due to security flaws discovered in the algorithm, WEP, the older protection method, is no longer considered secure even for home users.

The newer WPA/WPA2 encryption is inherently more secure than WEP. The only way to break WPA and WPA2 encryption is to use a brute force attack, which involves trying all possible passwords in the hope to discover the only correct one. It can take years to break into a WPA/WPA2 protected network with billions of possible combinations. However, WPA/WPA2 protected networks are not immune against distributed attacks performed with GPU-accelerated algorithms.