I don't know that cloudcrack uses FPGAs, but there were a couple guys at Defcon last year doing WPA cracking on Spartan3-based boards plugged into their laptops.  I'll try to dig up a link; I'm almost positive the bitstreams were based on the OpenCores sources I linked.

My point is that you *could* run a cracking service using FPGA hardware repurposed from mining, and people *are* willing to pay for such a service.

FPGAs way less powerful than the Spartan6 (which all the mining boards except BFL use) have been used for password recovery on .zip files, wifi password cracking, Bluetooth cracking, etc.  Code here:

http://openciphers.sourceforge.net/oc/index.php

Service that charges for this:

https://www.cloudcracker.com/

...an enterprising miner could launch their own.

Will do; I appreciate you guys standing by your guarantee.  Can't wait to receive my ModMiner.

For those of us whose order date is more than 4 weeks ago, how do we go about collecting our $100 since you didn't meet your guaranteed shipping time?  Do we need to email you or will you automatically send out refunds?

(FWIW, I totally understand that these things sometimes take longer than expected.  But since you made the guarantee...)

Most big sites use either bcrypt or PBKDF2 for password hashing.  The latter because it's standards-based, the former because it's designed to be difficult to implement in hardware and thus slow to crack.

In that case, Ztex is probably going to be your best bet.  The "something new" was most likely the 1.15y board, released a week or so ago.  It has 4 FPGAs on a single board, rather than the 1.15x board which has a single FPGA.  I own a couple of 1.15x's, and have a 1.15y on order that should arrive (fingers crossed) tomorrow.  Ztex has the best warranty (2 years) of any of the FPGA vendors, and has boards available today, but is slightly more expensive than other options.


I don't believe you can actually get a Raspberry Pi (they're continually sold out), but it would be perfect if you can get your hands on one.  Like I said, all you need is a computer with a USB port that's capable of running your choice of operating system and mining software.

Do you know how much (and what kind of) power is delivered to each rack?  120V?  208V?  48VDC?  20A?  Multiple 20A circuits?  Multiple 30A circuits?

As someone who's run data centers before, I can tell you that even with "unlimited" power, you run into issues of power density - how much power can be delivered to each rack and cooled effectively.  This almost certainly will affect your planning, so it's worth looking into.

Check out Ztex (ztex.de), they're in Germany.

If you're willing to purchase from the US, check out fpgamining.com, makers of the X6500.  They finally had some additional units in stock as of this morning.

Both of the above connect to the host via USB.  For a computer, just about anything with a USB port will work.  I personally use a Soekris net6501 running Linux, connected to a USB hub, connected to my boards:

http://soekris.com/products/net6501.html

It has the advantage of using almost no power and being fanless (== quiet).

I recently came across the OpenCiphers project:

http://openciphers.sourceforge.net/oc/index.php

It includes code that can be adapted to FPGA mining boards to do password recovery of encrypted files, crack wifi passwords, crack Bluetooth PINs, etc.

Lest one think there isn't a market for such a thing, I point to CloudCracker, a for-pay service that does just this:

https://www.cloudcracker.com/

I think this bodes well for the resale value of the FPGA boards which allow you to load your own bitstreams (Ztex, X6500, Icarus - basically everything except BFL).  Right now to do this you'd need the Xilinx compiler (which costs $3k) and enough knowledge of FPGA development to adapt the OpenCiphers code, but as the number of FPGA mining rigs increases, the market will be there for someone to start selling plug-and-play solutions for these sorts of applications.

Howdy!

My name's Dave.  I've been lurking here for a while now.

Currently mining with a single Ztex 1.15x, I have a 1.15y in the mail to (hopefully) arrive next week.

I've also been using Bitcoin mining as an excuse to learn about FPGA development, with the intention of seeing if I can squeeze some additional performance out of the various Spartan6 boards.