NSA@Home : FPGA-based SHA-1 and MD5 bruteforce cracker

NSA@home is a fast FPGA-based SHA-1 and MD5 bruteforce cracker. It is capable of searching the full 8-character keyspace (from a 64-character set) in about a day in the current configuration for 800 hashes concurrently, using about 240W of power. This performance is equivalent to over 1500 Athlon FX-60 CPUs, which would take about 250kW.

[Detail Spec.]

• core chips : 15 Virtex-II Pro (XC2VP20) FPGAs
• control chips : 3 Spartan-II (XC2S50) FPGAs
• DSP : 1 ADSP21160M (which probably calculated transform parameters)
• Size : 1u case
• Power : about 120W while operating with 6 fans
• Speed : 2^(6 * 8)=2^48 = 256,000,000M/day = 3000M/sec

[good choice]

• SHA1 best 'ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 - IGHASHGPU' : 640M/sec, 250W, $420
• MD5 best 'ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 - IGHASHGPU' : 2400M/sec, 250W, $420
• SHA1/MD5 NSA@Home : 3000M/sec, 120W, $??,000

[Link]

• NSA@Home - http://nsa.unaligned.org/
• The complete SHA-1 chip Verilog source can be found here.
• The MD5 chip uses most of the files from the SHA-1 one, and the new hash & toplevel is here.
• Spartan-II USB interface sources are here