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Sony Playstation used to crack password

Dec 11, 2007 in Hardcore Hacking, Hardware, Playstation

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.

This was important when attempting “brute force” attacks that go through all possible combinations for a password.

Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, Mr Breese said although the PS3 could be used to crack eight-character passwords featuring letters and numbers, stronger encryption systems - such as those used to safeguard web transactions - remained safe.

Mr Breese’s research comes soon after work by Russian company Elcomsoft to use graphics cards to speed up password cracking.

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The Cell chip has several processing cores to do number crunching

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 […]

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How to Clone a Hard Drive

Dec 11, 2007 in Hardware

Did know that you could clone your current Hard Drive without having to by extra software? Maybe you didn’t know that all that you needed, was already set up on your current system? Well, it is… and if you follow this tut, you shouldn’t have much of a problem.

Make sure that you have a Master […]

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Remove Scratches from CDs or DVDs

Dec 08, 2007 in General, Hardware

I have a large (over 800) collection of CD’s, and as the years go by, I’m finding more and more scratches on them. Financial blog Wise Bread was in the same predicament recently, and decided to do a little experimenting with how to get those scratches off once and for all.

A few different methods were […]

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