Playstation 3 Used to Fight Cyber Crimes by US Federal Agents

by Scott Wu | November 16, 2009 at 03:18 pm

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Playstation 3 is not just for serious gaming but it's also used by federal officers to crack computer passwords. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crimes Center (C3) are making use of the processing power of Playstation 3s to break computer encryption, as a measure to crack down internet crimes including child pornography.

Federal officers can seize and search a suspect's computer after securing a warrant, but authorities do not have the rights to force suspects to give out passwords. Thus the officers need to resort to brute force password breaking, in another word, trial and error. Using the superior computation power of PS3, computer forensics agents can gain access much faster.

The networked Playstation 3s can process 4 million passwords per second, cutting down on the time necessary to find the correct combination.

Of course, there are computers with more powerful processors, but PS3s are more efficient and cheaper than the computers the agents were using.

The PS3 is also slightly more efficient and - at $300 each - $8,000 cheaper than the Tableau/Dell server combination the agents were using before

The agents install Linux on the original PS3s to perform the specific tasks. However, the new PS3 slim does not work because of the restrictions that prevent modifications.