PlayStation 3 doubles as password cracker?

If frantically hammering controller buttons while ogling at the graphics muscle oozing from your PlayStation 3 is not enough to quell the rampant desire felt whenever reaching to finger the power button, then you’ll be thrilled to learn that Sony’s behemoth is so much more than ‘just’ a gaming machine and Blu-ray player. Security consultant reveals that PlayStation 3 Cell technology offers hackers increased performance when cracking passwords. Credit: Sony Corp.

Security consultant reveals that PlayStation 3 Cell technology offers hackers increased performance when cracking passwords. Credit: Sony Corp.Specifically, beyond lending its considerable processing strength to the likes of the honourable Folding(at)Home project, it turns out that nefarious individuals within the hacking community are able to adapt the PS3 in order to crack passwords with relative ease.According to Nick Breese, a security consultant with Auckland-based Hacker Security Assessment, the PlayStation 3’s Cell processing technology is able to provide hackers with up to 300 times more power than Intel hardware when it comes to breaking through password protection. Breese, airing his claims during the recent Kiwicon hacker conference in New Zealand, said that processing speed is the most important aspect in "brute force" password cracking. Moreover, a demonstration given by Breese produced 10-15 million cycles per second via powerful Intel architecture, which was then surpassed significantly by the Cell, which pushed out 1.4 billion cycles. The advantages of Cell arise due to it being equipped with several processing cores, which essentially allow each core to focus on applying different password combinations simultaneously. Breese, who has been working for around six months on the ‘Crackstation’ project, added that by applying Cell technology, hackers could crack strong eight-character passwords (usually associated with PDF, Zip, and Microsoft Office) in a matter of hours opposed to a matter of days.However, Breese also said that while the PlayStation 3 could be tasked to break such file-based eight-character protection, encryption safeguards connected to secure Web transactions likely will not be affected.