Hackers Use 200 Playstation 3 Consoles to Crack SSL Certificates

[Snake612]

I read this article on g4tv about people from US and Europe that hack these things. I don't know what it is.

Just read the article

[source]:g4tv.com

Remember when people were scared of the PlayStation 3 being used for nefarious purposes? You know, with it's uber powerful cell processor and all? It turns out they were right! A group of hackers used a farm of 200 PS3s to crack SSL (secure sockets layer) certificates. According to ZDNet's Zero Day blog:

"Using computing power from a cluster of 200 PS3 game consoles and about $700 in test digital certificates, a group of hackers in the U.S. and Europe have found a way to target a known weakness in the MD5 algorithm to create a rogue Certification Authority (CA), a breakthrough that allows the forging of certificates that are fully trusted by all modern Web browsers."

The hackers recently presented their research at the 25C3 conference. This is pretty crazy stuff. People have already been using their PS3s as powerful distributed computing device (Folding@home), but this takes it to another level. Hopefully Dr. Evil never gets his hands on a PlayStation 3 cluster.