Bitcoin FPGA for PW hacking

[anode]

I've sen these FPGA or ASICs used to mine bitcoins. FPGA are FAST, and stacking them kinda makes sense.

Now bitcoin is just hash work, so pondering using these 'boxes' to crack PWs and such.

Easy, hard, near impossible, or pointless?

[dustbyter]

These FPGA would be able to work to crack passwords.

I was interested in purchasing one, but for the price I couldn't afford it.

[eovnu87435ds]

Theoretically, yes, but the downfall is that these devices have code on them that's specifically for bitcoin mining. You would have to modify or write your own code for other uses, and that is no simple task for FPGAs, since everything is done in digital logic rather than a programming language like C, and their performance relies on how efficiently you write your logic.

The reason it works for bitcoin is that everything is the same encryption, the same length, etc. You hardly find that with passwords, so for max performance, you need to write different logic sets for different types of passwords and encryption methods

Edited April 24, 2013 by eovnu87435ds

[anode]

Oh well. pondered getting one for dual use. Not worth it to me for a single task.

Not too interested in learning Verilogic or the like.

.....was a thought.