Sony’s latest gaming console, the multifaceted PlayStation3's another side has finally come to light, Hacker Security-Assessment.com's security consultant Nick Breese says that the PlayStation3 is really great asset for hackers. Nick Breese claims that the Sony PlayStation3's powerful Cell processors can crack passwords 300 times faster than what Intel hardware is capable of. He claimed that speed is the most decisive factor in "brute force" password cracking. To prove his claims,he implemented common ciphers and hash functions using vector computing. Nick pushed the current upper limit of 10–15 million cycles per second to 1.4 billion cycles per second in Intel based processors. Breese, who has been working on a project which he likes to call "Crackstation", for the past six months. He likes to credit his breakthrough to the use of Sony PlayStation 3 gaming consoles.

IBM, Toshiba and the insanely obvious Sony are the brains behind the creation of the PS3’s cell broadband engine technology. The team's collaboration created a Cell, a processor with one scalar processor and eight vector processors. Comparing Intel processors which are designed to do all kinds of complex calculations, with the PS3 which is good at simple calculations, Bresse said that fast calculations make the PS3 a really good cryptographic device. Breese, like everyone is hoping that his findings will force software-makers to step up their password security.

[caption id="attachment_129" align="alignnone" width="475" caption="The baby faced Assasin :)"][/caption]