Developer creates a password-cracking Game Boy Advance that is ‘about thirty million times slower than a modern cracking rig’
A security engineer has ported Hashcat, a popular password recovery utility, to the Game Boy Advance—the 21-year-old Nintendo handheld console. While Hashcat markets itself as “the world’s fastest” password cracking tool on modern hardware, its performance on the GBA is decidedly more leisurely.
The ported version runs on the GBA’s 16.78 MHz ARM7TDMI processor, achieving 727 SHA256 hashes per second. By comparison, this represents approximately thirty million times slower performance than contemporary password-cracking rigs. Despite the dramatic performance disparity, the project exemplifies the kind of experimental, capability-driven programming that appeals to security engineers and retro computing enthusiasts.
The developer characterized the project with a “why not?” approach, emphasizing that this isn’t a full port of Hashcat but rather a modified version designed to work within the GBA’s significant hardware constraints. The demonstration highlights both the ambitious scope of modern password recovery tools and the stark limitations of legacy gaming hardware when tasked with computationally intensive work.