Cracking Windows

SWISS researchers have released a paper outlining how to increase the speed of cracking alphanumeric Windows passwords, reducing the time to break the codes to an average of 13.6 seconds, from an average speed of 1 minute 41 seconds.

The method, called time-memory trade-off, involves faster calculations required to break the code by using large look-up tables to match encoded passwords to the original text entered by a user.