If you’re really in a hurry to “recover” that password from the WPA-secured wi-fi network you’re “sharing” with a neighbor, you’re going to be waiting a long time for that brute force crack to work on your old traditional processor. Why not make yourself a tool using NVIDIA’s parallel processing environment CUDA and run it on a nice GeForce GTX 280 series? That’ll decrease your wait time by quite a bit, as these guys proved. In fact, it increased the speed at which they could recover a password by 10,000%.
That’s not to say you can just grab passwords out of the air, of course, and WPA is still as secure as it was yesterday, but if someone sets their mind to cracking your network, it’s going to take them about a hundredth of the time now if they set it up right. Not exactly the best PR, but I think NVIDIA will take what they can get right now.
Update: UberGizmo has more information. What, it’s Friday and I’m lazy to begin with!