You’d think of Sony’s PS3 as being good for gaming. But not many would associate it with cracking passwords. Yet that’s what security researcher Nick Breese. He’s used a PS3 to radically speed up password cracking, using the game console to crack eight-character passwords believed to be“strong” in just hours, rather than the days it would have taken on a computer, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald. The secretis in the Cell processor that runs the PS3, which goes through 1.4 billion cycles per second, as opposed to an Intel chip which runs at 10-15 million cycles per second, Breese explained at theKiwicon Security Conference last month. The Cell chip contains several processing cores, each one of which can be carrying out actions. Breese, who worksfor Security Assessment in New Zealand, also made the changes necessary to turn the PS3 into a password cracker.
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