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Federal officers use video game console to catch child pornographers
By Joseph D. Szydlowski
(AXcess News) Washington - For most Playstation 3 users, the criminals they catch and the victims they save are just pixilated simulations on a TV screen.
But some federal officers are using the gaming console to protect children and catch predators in real life.
"Bad guys are encrypting their stuff now, so we need a methodology of hacking on that to try to break passwords," said Claude E. Davenport, a senior special agent at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crimes Center, known as C3. "The Playstation 3 - its processing component - is perfect for large-scale library attacks."
C3 focuses on transnational Internet crimes, including child pornography that has crossed national boundaries. Those illegal images typically originate in Third World or developing countries, Davenport said. But when the child pornography enters the United States via placement on U.S. computer servers, it also enters C3's jurisdiction.
After securing a warrant, agents can seize and search a suspect's computer, but the Fourth Amendment prevents authorities from forcing suspects to surrender their passwords, Davenport said.
The agents, whose suburban office is not identified on the building directory, have to crack the encryptions, and to do that they need to try a massive amount of letter-and-number combinations.
"Normally, if you're going to try to break a password, you're going to have to go through all the permutations of a password," said Douglas Skinner, ICE computer forensic agent.
He explained that the number of possible combinations in a six-digit password is 256 to the sixth power.
In other words: 281,474,976,710,656 possibilities - that's nearly 282 trillion.
"Encryption's getting very statistical," he said.
How do agents deal with such a large number of possibilities?
"You try brute force," said Neil Condon, vice president of Public Affairs for AccessData Corp., a software company that specializes in digital investigations. The company discovered the PS3's ability.
With that, Condon said, "You take the ability of a single person to throw a few passwords at it a minute to a few million a second."
The networked Playstation 3s can process 4 million passwords per second, cutting down on the time necessary to find the correct combination.
Condon said that the PS3's key to unlocking password protection lies in its computing power: Gaming consoles do a lot of processing to produce the crisp, detailed visuals found in video games.
Condon said that any graphics card has the potential, including those in other gaming systems.
What other systems don't have, however, is adaptability. Condon said that, unlike its fellow next-generation gaming machines, the PS3 lets users install Linux, a free, open-source operating system.
The PS3 is also slightly more efficient and - at $300 each - $8,000 cheaper than the Tableau/Dell server combination the agents were using before, Skinner said.
Once officers unlock the sought-after files and photographs, some of which show the suspects themselves violating children, officers can use the files and photographs in their investigations.
Unfortunately for ICE, the new slim-PS3 won't suffice.
"The newer PS3s have been restricted, locked down, so you can't put Linux on them," Condon said.
ICE is hoping to buy 40 more original PS3s, through auction sites such as eBay.com, to add to the 20 it already has, Davenport said.
Despite having so many PS3s at their disposal, both Skinner and Davenport said agents have resisted the temptation to play video games on the consoles.
"There's no controllers hooked up," Davenport said.
Federal officers use video game console to catch child pornographers
By Joseph D. Szydlowski
(AXcess News) Washington - For most Playstation 3 users, the criminals they catch and the victims they save are just pixilated simulations on a TV screen.
But some federal officers are using the gaming console to protect children and catch predators in real life.
"Bad guys are encrypting their stuff now, so we need a methodology of hacking on that to try to break passwords," said Claude E. Davenport, a senior special agent at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crimes Center, known as C3. "The Playstation 3 - its processing component - is perfect for large-scale library attacks."
C3 focuses on transnational Internet crimes, including child pornography that has crossed national boundaries. Those illegal images typically originate in Third World or developing countries, Davenport said. But when the child pornography enters the United States via placement on U.S. computer servers, it also enters C3's jurisdiction.
After securing a warrant, agents can seize and search a suspect's computer, but the Fourth Amendment prevents authorities from forcing suspects to surrender their passwords, Davenport said.
The agents, whose suburban office is not identified on the building directory, have to crack the encryptions, and to do that they need to try a massive amount of letter-and-number combinations.
"Normally, if you're going to try to break a password, you're going to have to go through all the permutations of a password," said Douglas Skinner, ICE computer forensic agent.
He explained that the number of possible combinations in a six-digit password is 256 to the sixth power.
In other words: 281,474,976,710,656 possibilities - that's nearly 282 trillion.
"Encryption's getting very statistical," he said.
How do agents deal with such a large number of possibilities?
"You try brute force," said Neil Condon, vice president of Public Affairs for AccessData Corp., a software company that specializes in digital investigations. The company discovered the PS3's ability.
With that, Condon said, "You take the ability of a single person to throw a few passwords at it a minute to a few million a second."
The networked Playstation 3s can process 4 million passwords per second, cutting down on the time necessary to find the correct combination.
Condon said that the PS3's key to unlocking password protection lies in its computing power: Gaming consoles do a lot of processing to produce the crisp, detailed visuals found in video games.
Condon said that any graphics card has the potential, including those in other gaming systems.
What other systems don't have, however, is adaptability. Condon said that, unlike its fellow next-generation gaming machines, the PS3 lets users install Linux, a free, open-source operating system.
The PS3 is also slightly more efficient and - at $300 each - $8,000 cheaper than the Tableau/Dell server combination the agents were using before, Skinner said.
Once officers unlock the sought-after files and photographs, some of which show the suspects themselves violating children, officers can use the files and photographs in their investigations.
Unfortunately for ICE, the new slim-PS3 won't suffice.
"The newer PS3s have been restricted, locked down, so you can't put Linux on them," Condon said.
ICE is hoping to buy 40 more original PS3s, through auction sites such as eBay.com, to add to the 20 it already has, Davenport said.
Despite having so many PS3s at their disposal, both Skinner and Davenport said agents have resisted the temptation to play video games on the consoles.
"There's no controllers hooked up," Davenport said.
