All Your Passwords Are Belong to FPGA

When used for cracking passwords, a modern high-end graphics card will absolutely chew through “classic” hashing algorithms like SHA-1 and SHA-2. When a single desktop machine can run through 50+ billion password combinations per second, even decent passwords can be guessed in a worryingly short amount of time. Luckily, advanced …read more

Continue reading All Your Passwords Are Belong to FPGA

Crunching Giant Data from the Large Hadron Collider

Modern physics experiments are often complex, ambitious, and costly. The times where scientific progress could be made by conducting a small tabletop experiment in your lab are mostly over. Especially, in fields like astrophysics or particle physics, you need huge telescopes, expensive satellite missions, or giant colliders run by international …read more

Continue reading Crunching Giant Data from the Large Hadron Collider

Using an FPGA to Glitch the Olimex LPC-P1343

After trying out hardware hacking using an FPGA to interface with target hardware, [Grazfather] was inspired to try using the iCEBreaker (one of the many hobbyist FPGAs to have recently flooded the market) to build a UART-controllable glitcher for the Olimex LPC-P1343.

When the target board boots up, the bootROM …read more

Continue reading Using an FPGA to Glitch the Olimex LPC-P1343

NEO430 Puts A Custom MSP430 Core In Your FPGA

We are certainly spoiled by all the microcontroller options nowadays — which is a great problem to have. But between the good old 8-bit controllers and an increasing number of 32-bit varieties, it almost seems as if the 16-bit ones are slowly falling into oblivion. [stnolting] particularly saw an issue …read more

Continue reading NEO430 Puts A Custom MSP430 Core In Your FPGA

Researchers Break FPGA Encryption Using FPGA Encryption

FPGAs are awesome — they can be essentially configured into becoming any computing device you want. Simply load your selected bitstream into the device on boot, and it behaves like a different piece of hardware. With great power comes great responsibility.

You might try to hack a given FPGA system …read more

Continue reading Researchers Break FPGA Encryption Using FPGA Encryption

Fear of Potato Chips: Samy Kamkar’s Side-Channel Attack Roundup

What do potato chips and lost car keys have in common? On the surface, it would seem not much, unless you somehow managed to lose your keys in a bag of chips, which would be embarrassing enough that you’d likely never speak of it. But there is a surprising link …read more

Continue reading Fear of Potato Chips: Samy Kamkar’s Side-Channel Attack Roundup