PlayStation used to crack passwords
The powerful chip at the heart of Sony’s PlayStation gaming console has been used to crack passwords faster than ever before.
Security researcher Nick Breese used a PS3 to crack supposedly strong eight-character passwords in hours.
Typically, previous attempts to crack such passwords took days to get the same result.
Eight-character passwords are used to protect PDF and Zip files as well as those produced by Microsoft Office.
The work to turn the PS3 into a password cracker was carried out by Nick Breese, who works for Auckland-based Security Assessment.
The Cell processor at the heart of the PS3 is the key to speeding up the time it takes to crack a password.
In a presentation given at the Kiwicon security conference in mid-November, Mr Breese said a powerful Intel chip could crank through 10-15 million cycles per second.
The architecture of the Cell processor meant it could speed through 1.4 billion cycles per second. This speed boost was possible because each Cell chip had several processing cores - each one of which could be effectively trying passwords at the same time.
[BBC NEWS]
