And it does so almost four times cheaper than a PC does

Nov 16, 2009 09:59 GMT  ·  By

You may find it confusing at times why exactly people don't refer to the PlayStation 3 or to the Xbox 360 as their just being gaming consoles. Well, that's because they can do so much more than just run games. As it turns out, the PS3, among all the other things it can do, can convict criminals. The way in itself is a pretty odd one, but a very nice workaround with a home-baked solution that ends up as a cost-effective result. What once took a $1,100 computer to solve can be just as easily done with Sony's $300 PlayStation 3.

Joseph D. Szydlowski of the Scripps Howard Foundation Wire talked to Claude E. Davenport, an agent in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crimes Center, and found out that computers weren't the best tools for getting by security passwords. "Bad guys are encrypting their stuff now, so we need a methodology of hacking on that to try to break passwords," Davenport said. "The Playstation 3 – its processing component – is perfect for large-scale library attacks."

As a legal footnote to clear things up, according to the Forth Amendment, suspected criminals are not obliged to reveal the passwords used to protect the information they have stored on a legally seized drive. But the Amendment also doesn't forbid the authorities to make use of "any means necessary" to crack those passwords and get by them in any other way. In the past, those necessary means were satisfied by a Tableau/Dell server cross-breed that cost somewhere around $1,100.

But it seems like the same task can be performed by the PS3, so networked consoles are now used to solve the 282-trillion-possibility puzzle that a single six-digit password can hold. Neil Condon, vice president of Public Affairs for AccessData Corp., said to SHFW that, "You take the ability of a single person to throw a few passwords at it a minute to a few million a second." Now, the thing is that, while Condon said that any current-gen console could accomplish the same thing, it's the PS3's ability to support a Linux installation on it that makes it a favorable candidate.