Question 1

What is password entropy and how is it calculated?

Accepted Answer

Password entropy is a mathematical measure of a password's unpredictability, expressed in bits. It is calculated by multiplying the password length by the binary logarithm of the character pool size: E = L * log2(R). A higher entropy value means a larger search space, making automated brute-force guessing exponentially more difficult.

Question 2

Why does Argon2id resist GPU brute-forcing better than PBKDF2?

Accepted Answer

Argon2id is a memory-hard key derivation function. In PassCrypt, it requires 64MB of RAM per key generation. Because GPUs (like the RTX 4090) have limited VRAM (24GB), they run out of memory after just 384 concurrent threads. PBKDF2 has no memory requirements, enabling millions of parallel GPU calculations. This memory bottleneck reduces GPU cracking speeds from thousands of attempts per second to just 2-4 attempts.

Question 3

How fast can an Nvidia RTX 4090 crack standard passwords?

Accepted Answer

For compute-bound hashes (like MD5 or SHA256 without memory locks), an RTX 4090 can compute over 30 billion guesses per second. For PBKDF2-SHA256 at 600,000 iterations, the speed is reduced to approximately 7,000 guesses per second. For Argon2id (64MB), it is throttled to 2-4 guesses per second due to memory-hard constraints.

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