US Government Using PS3s To Break Encryption

[wraggster]

It seems that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crimes Center, known as C3, has replaced its '$8,000 Tableau/Dell server combination' with more efficient and much cheaper $300 PS3s. Each PS3 is capable of 4 million passwords per second, and C3 currently has 20 PS3s with plans to buy 40 more. Naturally this is only being used to break encryption on computers seized with a warrant and suspected of harboring child pornography

http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/11/18/2149202/US-Government-Using-PS3s-To-Break-Encryption

[jamotto]

Impressive, but still too slow a 12 character password with just lowercase and digits would take the better part of three centuries before having a 50% chance of being broken.