That's good IMO, I had a bad feeling about 5Ghash+ password crackers being released into the wild with no oversight.
Oversight? You're sounding like a statist.
I say release 5 Gh/s password crackers into the wild and let the chips fall where they may!
+1
Id expect this to be the what people replacing FPGA with ASIC do... Time to use scrypt with a very high N for security purposes...
Or SHA-512. But yeah, bitcoin FPGAs usually take getwork/stratum data as input and give as output a 32-bit nonce. They do not transmit the hashes outside the chip because 300Million x 256bit per second is 76.8Gbits of bandwidth. So no, they can't really be used to crack passwords.
I would imagine that ASICs use the same sort of paradigm.
Yeah ASIC work in similar manner IMHO, but what i mean is FPGA can be re-programmed to find hashes. No need for bandwidth. Send target hash. let fpga run bruteforce , and return valid cleartext if found. 200MH sha256(sha256(x)) ~ 400 MH sha256(x).
6 character lower case + upper case + number = 56800235584 combinations or ~56800 MH so 142 seconds on single lx150
prolly take lesser time since data sizes is small... dunno...
Yep. Fortunately FPGAs are pricey and make up a very small portion of the hashrate. The current generation of ASICs cannot be easily re-purposed to crack passwords. As you say though, one could design an ASIC to crack password hashes pretty easily.
