Here's a creative, if ethically questionable, application for FPGAs. -Tom Cloud service cracks VPN passwords in 24 hours http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Cloud-service-cracks-VPN-passwords-in-24-hours-1656104.html
At the Black Hat hacker conference in Las Vegas, encryption expert Moxie Marlinspike promised that his CloudCracker web service was able to crack any VPN or WiFi connection secured using MS-CHAPv2 within 24 hours. The cost? Around $200. [...] With the help of a company called Picocomputing, Marlinspike has developed a processing server which is able to test 18 billion keys per second - a feat which would normally require 80,000 CPUs. The server is equipped with 48 programmable processing units known as field programmable gate arrays (FPGA). Each FPGA is programmed to provide 40 parallel processing units, each with a clock speed of 450 MHz, for cracking DES. _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking
