{"id":1640767,"date":"2026-07-21T10:50:19","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T10:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/Yj2EDncqvGGdR9ae4Nq3A3"},"modified":"2026-07-21T10:50:19","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T10:50:19","slug":"developer-creates-a-password-cracking-game-boy-advance-that-is-about-thirty-million-times-slower-than-a-modern-cracking-rig","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/developer-creates-a-password-cracking-game-boy-advance-that-is-about-thirty-million-times-slower-than-a-modern-cracking-rig\/","title":{"rendered":"Developer creates a password-cracking Game Boy Advance that is ‘about thirty million times slower than a modern cracking rig’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A security engineer has “ported” one of the best known password recovery utilities to the GameBoy Advance. The port is based on Hashcat, a password recovery utility that otherwise pitches itself as the “world’s fastest.” But I’m doing the bunny ears around ‘ported’ because even the developer admits this is “not really” Hashcat in full.<\/p>\n

It turns out the 21-year-old Nintendo handheld console is also not really the best hardware for cracking passwords. “The monstrously powerful 16.78 MHz ARM7TDMI chip does an astronomical 727 SHA256 hashes per second!! Which is about thirty million times slower than a modern cracking rig,” Project developer Mark El-Khoury jokes on LinkedIn<\/a>, “350 days of continuous cracking on this bad boy could be done in about 1 second with a modern GPU-accelerated cracking rig.”<\/p>\n

Even with its snail’s pace, I can’t help but dream up a heist movie where the would-be thieves only use repurposed gaming hardware like this to crack open password-protected vaults. I can just picture the scene now: ‘How much longer is this gonna take?’ ‘Uh, well, you may want to pitch up a tent\u2026?’ Riveting.<\/p>\n

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