Swiss security outfit Objectif Sécurité has discovered a way of cracking 14 digit Windows XP passwords in just 5.3 seconds.

The outfit has managed to optimised its rainbow table of password hashes for use with solid-state drives. Objectif Sécurité's Philippe Oechslin said that the result was 100 times faster than previously possible.

Apparently much of the bottleneck in cracking passwords based on password hash lookups is the speed of the hard drive. Using an AMD Athlon X2 4400+ processor and the optimised tables with 80GB of password hashes on an SSD password cracking was superfast.

Objectif Sécurité claims the cracking is 500 times faster than a password cracker from Russian firm Elcomsoft that utilizes NVIDIA GPUs.